Reading Austin’s post puts me in mind of a topic I meant to mention here before I got sucked into my thesis vortex: the new “Impossible is Nothing” advertising campaign Adidas just launched in China and its excruciatingly vivid illustration of the kind of heat Chinese athletes face as the big dance approaches.

I wouldn’t ordinarily devote space on this blog to advertising, particularly when it comes from a company that gets plenty of exposure on its own. Every so often, however, one has to suck it up and recognize that a marketing firm (in this case, TWBA) has done something truly noteworthy.

What’s noteworthy about the Adidas campaign, which launched late last year, is its imagery: Color shots of various Chinese athletes doing their thing with the help of–sometimes on top of–millions of their compatriots, the latter strikingly sketched in black-and-white. According to the Shanghaiist, the campaign took six months to put together. In an earlier post on the TIME China Blog, Austin mentioned seeing immense crowds on Wangfujing, Beijing’s tawdry shopping street equivalent of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, queuing up in icy weather last month for a chance to have their photos inserted into post-card versions of the ad. The campaign has attracted massive, largely adoring, attention in the PR world. The Shanghaiist and Austin also both appear to have been inspired by it.

I’ll admit, the ads are breathtaking. Transcendent even. Like Apple’s legendary ad for the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl. But there is also something undeniably disturbing about them, particularly in the spot (see above) featuring Olympic champion diver Hu Jia, in which people have replaced both the diving platform and the water. [Click here to see it full-size. I mean it. Click.]

The image reminds me of a painting I once saw in a Confucian temple in Jilin that depicted a precarious human pyramid composed of thousands of Imperial exam candidates climbing on top of each other in a bid to reach the highest official position. The Adidas ad’s message for Chinese people may be unity rather than competition, but it’s no less frightening for that reason.

The socio-political and nationalist implications of the campaign are deep and textured, and I’m sure someone with better deconstructionist chops than myself will eventually have a go at those. In the meantime, I worry what the ads mean for the poor individuals at the center of them. I’m sure there isn’t a Chinese Olympic athlete alive who hasn’t spent hours alone in the dark worrying about how the country’s billion-plus will react if they fail to meet expectations. But now the nightmare is rendered for them in vivid detail and broadcast everywhere–on billboards, on their friends’ TV sets, in the subways. Sure, the people in the ads are all hopping around in exuberant anticipation of victory, but how difficult it is to imagine that same writing mass shouting in the rage of defeat?

Athletes of that caliber probably thrive on pressure in ways mortal people don’t. Liu Xiang, at least, claims to revel in it. But certainly there must be a limit beyond which that pressure becomes counter-productive, when athletes get overloaded with it, like car engines flooded with too much gas.

Of course, in a sense, that’s precisely what makes the ads so brilliant. Whether Hu Jia wins and sends the crowd into mass hysteria or loses and gets torn apart, the message is the same: There’s no way you can miss this.

For my money, the still images have the greatest impact, but here’s the video version for those of you who want to see it: