Far from basking in its position as the undisputed king of sportswear and sporting equipment, Nike is actually struggling to fight its way out of a two-year-long doldrum in which robust growth has been as elusive as a golf ball in the rough on a foggy day. Far from being able to exhort new young consumers to get the sporting bug and “just do it”, as the slogan has it, Nike seems to be antagonising as many people as it is attracting, despite its best public relations efforts.Once it was cool to wear Nike shoes and parade them around the shopping mall, or the ghetto. But the company has now become a bogeyman for the burgeoning movement against unfettered global trade because of its heavy reliance on cheap labour in Third World garment factories.Far from being greeted with open arms in Australia, the most lasting impression the company has had of the 2000 Summer Olympics so far is of demonstrators marching through the streets of Melbourne on Monday night chanting: “Hey, Nike, you so bad. You so bad, you make me mad.”To the best of anybody’s knowledge, the two sources of grief are not related, or at least not directly. There is no evidence that the continuing grassroots campaign against Nike’s labour practices has put much of a dent in consumer demand, which has slowed down for other, easily identifiable reasons like the Asian economic crisis and the sluggishness of the US clothing market.By the same token, it does not appear that Nike’s efforts to neutralise its human rights detractors, by offering pay rises and improved working conditions to at least some of its sub-contractors in South-east Asia, have significantly raised the company’s costs. Both problems strike at Nike’s perception of the kind of company it is: one fixated on youth and the culture of youth. Young companies, or at least ones that feel young, grow fast and furious.

Young companies are in tune with the times and sensitive to social concerns of the MTV generation. Nike is going through a phase of feeling distinctly middle-aged.There is little much to be ashamed of in its economic performance. Nike grew rapidly from $4bn in sales to more than twice that, largely thanks to the input of Michael Jordan at the height of his basketball career and the successful marketing of sport as the quintessential middle-class aspiration. But the company has been treading water for a couple of years as it looks for the next opportunity to launch it on another upward sprint. In the last full financial year, which ended in May, the company posted a modest 2 per cent growth in revenue to around $9bn, with net profits up 28 per cent to $579.1m helped by internal cost-cutting.The share price has wobbled, but not in a way to rattle investors excessively. The restlessness, such as it is, has come just as much from the company as from its shareholders “For the last two years, growth has been a state of mind… only,” Nike’s co-founder and chief executive, Phil Knight, wrote in the introduction to the latest annual report “Our revenues have not grown.

We have given the familiar reasons – and they have been good ones – US industry cycle, the Asia meltdown, over-building in the US retail market, etc. But I, like you, am getting a little impatient for some revenue growth.”The language of the report was at times reminiscent of a gritty sporting contender knowing he has to pull out all the stops to turn the tables and convert a looming defeat into a romping victory “We will have bad times,” wrote Mr Knight “But then we will have better times and, soon, great times We can do this. We will do this.”Nike already has a plan, or rather a series of plans. One is to continue its remarkable international expansion: it already serves markets in 110 countries and is doing well in nearly all (even if the weakness of the euro has dented the dollar value of its performance in Europe).Another is to keep capitalising on new sporting trends. Nike was remarkably quick in picking up on Tiger Woods, long before he became a phenomenon.