Nike Cryoshot Zoom M9 x USA x V.A.A. Is Built on Mia Hamm’s Boot

The Cryoshot Zoom M9 x USA x V.A.A. arrived in June as the United States entry in Nike‘s seven-country football collection, and it is the only pair in that group built on a women’s boot. The shoe says so itself. Along the heel, set in the typographic style Virgil Abloh made famous, it reads V.A.A. for NIKE, “MIA HAMM,” Beaverton, Oregon USA, and a 1999 copyright line. Nike put Mia Hamm’s name on the back of its United States shoe for a men’s World Cup, and most of the coverage never mentioned it.

Cryoshot is Nike’s method for turning archive football boots into shoes made for pavement. The original stud geometry stays exactly where it was and gets sealed inside a clear housing, so the boot is preserved rather than flattened. Nike has said the idea came from cryogenic preservation, and that finding a compound transparent enough to show the studs without going stiff took the team roughly a year. Under the housing sits a drop-in midsole with a heel Zoom unit and rubber lugs. The franchise reaches back to Montebelluna, the Italian bootmaking town where Nike set up football research in the mid-1990s after the Air Rio landed quietly in 1995. The Air GX followed in 1997 and the Mercurial R9 in 1998, and those two boots are the reason Nike’s football identity looks the way it does. Enrico Carbonere, Harry Sun and Michele Galasso are the credited names on the Cryoshot program. The line first appeared in public on players at the 2025 Champions League final weekend, four months before the Paris exhibition that a lot of write-ups still credit as its debut.

This one is the Zoom M9, and the name carries the whole thing. M9 is Mia and the number 9 she wore. Nike’s product copy says V.A.A. built the shoe to honor Hamm’s tournament performance, and the heel stamp puts her name in quotation marks next to Beaverton and that 1999 date. The upper is quilted white with university red at the tongue tab and the sole flecking, and “AIR” sits in quotation marks along the lateral side. Two things this post previously got wrong are worth naming rather than quietly fixing. It said the shoe came out of the exhibition called The Codes. It did not. The Codes is a Nike and Virgil Abloh Archive exhibition series, most recently at the Grand Palais in Paris from September 30 to October 9, 2025, and this shoe belongs to Nike’s separate X2 football program. The post also wrote the archive as plural and the model as CryoShot. Nike writes the archive singular and the shoe as Cryoshot.

The tension underneath the collection is that Nike is telling two American soccer stories at once and they do not line up. The apparel reaches for 1994, the summer the men’s tournament was played on American soil. The shoe reaches for 1999, and 1999 was a women’s tournament: the final at the Rose Bowl on July 10, 1999, the United States and China scoreless through extra time, the United States through 5 to 4 on penalties in front of 90,185 people. Hamm took one of them. Five years and one gender apart, stitched into a collection for a third World Cup. One more thing worth stating plainly, because press coverage keeps blurring it. Nike’s own language credits this design to V.A.A. as an organization, not to Abloh personally. He died in November 2021, and the archive left behind runs past 20,000 objects. This is that archive being worked with rather than a shoe he finished.

Retail is $200, and the figure needs saying because a good share of the feeds have it wrong. StockX carries $210 as the retail price here and on the Patta pair from the same collection, and at least one outlet reprinted it. V.A.A.’s own store and its raffle both priced the shoe at $200, Feature listed it at $200, and Nike Australia listed A$270, which is $200 at Nike’s standard conversion. Resale has settled near issue price. Last sale on StockX sits around $237 across roughly 610 sales in three months. The Patta pair, same drop, same date, same retail, last sold closer to $130 on about a third of that volume.

The Cryoshot Zoom M9 x USA x V.A.A. is style code IM3886-100 at $200, in white and university red. It released in three stages rather than one: June 11 through V.A.A. and federation retail, June 13 at Dover Street Market, and June 16 on SNKRS and select Nike partner retail. This post previously stored June 16 as the release date, which was the last of the three. Sizes are gone at Nike and at V.A.A.’s own shop, so the live options now are Nike, Feature and the secondary market at StockX.

Read next: The complete 2026 World Cup archive, every match, every goal, and the kit and boot each one was scored in.

Source: Justfreshkicks

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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