In today’s Finshots, we tell you how World Athletics is shaking up the super shoe supremacy race among elite brands.

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The Story

For years, running a mile in under four minutes was considered the ultimate challenge in middle-distance running. Experts even thought it was impossible for a human to run that fast!

Yet just last year, 69 athletes completed races with mile times under four minutes.¹ For context, the annual number of such achievements stayed in the single digits until 2006, with no more than 29 athletes breaking the barrier in any given year.²

But now, those numbers have surged, with a steady stream of athletes running sub-four-minute miles. So how did that happen, you ask?

Well, enter super shoes.

Think of these as shoes with a serious power-up. They’ve got carbon fibre plates in the sole that hug the foot, plus super-bouncy foam that helps runners spring forward instead of sinking into the ground. This design simply gives runners extra energy with every step, making each stride smoother and faster. And if that sounds like clever marketing, think again.

In 2023, Ethiopia’s Tigist Assefa made history at the Berlin Marathon by clocking in at an incredible 2 hours 11 minutes and 53 seconds. She didn’t just break the previous record of 2 hours 14 minutes and 4 seconds, she destroyed it.

And this precise timing matters because in the world of marathons, every second counts and records are usually broken by tiny margins. But Assefa did something extraordinary. She beat the old record by a whopping 2 minutes and 11 seconds, a difference that’s rare in a race where records are typically beaten by shaving off mere seconds. Thanks to Adidas’s Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 super shoe that played a big role in helping her set that world record.

But starting today, breaking records by such large margins might become a lot harder, especially in running and other track and field events.

The reason?

World Athletics, the governing body for these events, has introduced new rules limiting the thickness of shoe soles to 20 millimetres for all track and field competitions (so marathons don’t count).³ Just a couple of years ago, that limit was 30 millimetres.

If you’re wondering why, it’s because elite brands like Nike and Adidas have been giving athletes a serious edge with their advanced ‘super shoes’ — shoes with a form of tech that some even compared to doping.

You see, cutting down race times isn’t just about training hard; it’s also about the tech advances in shoe design. And this super shoe tech race among elite brands really kicked off in 2016.⁴

That year, Nike introduced the Vaporfly 4%, a shoe marketed as boosting running efficiency by around 4-5%.⁵ In marathon terms, that’s several minutes saved and a huge advantage. Nike’s innovation, backed by clever marketing, quickly set the brand apart and strengthened its hold on the market.

To put things in perspective, between 2016 and 2019, Nike kept pushing its super shoe innovations, launching the Next% and AlphaFly models, each promising even more than a 4% boost in running efficiency. And just like that, nearly 8 out of 10 marathon winners were sporting Nikes.⁶

The message was clear. If you wanted to break records, you needed Nike’s Vaporfly or AlphaFly.

This sparked a super shoe war among rival brands. Adidas, Asics, New Balance, On, Puma, Saucony and Under Armour, all began pouring money into research, racing to develop technology that could match Nike’s and boost performance for their athletes.

This meant that these shoe makers began floating different kinds of super shoes in the market, each with thicker foam soles, often maxing out the thickness limits allowed.

And you can bet that World Athletics was keeping a close eye on all these developments. It even saw how in 2019, Olympic Marathon Champion Eliud Kipchoge from Kenya became the first athlete to run a marathon in under two hours. Now, running 42 kilometres (or 26.2 miles) in less than two hours is no easy feat. It had never been done before. And although it wasn’t an official competition or a marathon run under World Athletics’ specific rules, it still captured the world’s attention. Kipchoge was wearing Nike AlphaFly shoes by the way.

And World Athletics realised that brands like Nike weren’t just giving athletes a technological edge, they were also putting others at a disadvantage. If you’re wondering how, well, elite brands like Nike and Adidas were sponsoring only the top athletes with their new super shoes, which often included prototypes that weren’t even available to the public. While this helped those lucky athletes, it left others who couldn’t afford these pricey shoes, often costing upwards of $300, at a clear disadvantage. There was no level playing field.

That’s why, starting in 2020, World Athletics began to tweak the shoe rules to find a balance between fairness in the sport and the technological improvements from shoe giants. It started phasing in reductions in shoe sole thickness, averaging about 5 millimetres each year. And starting today, athletes running on tracks can’t wear shoes thicker than 20 millimetres.

So does this mean that this is the end of the super shoe battle?

At first, it certainly seemed that way. From 2016 to 2020, you’d often see runners at the front of road races almost exclusively wearing Nikes. And since Nike’s super shoes were within the average range for sole thickness and didn’t max out the limits, other brands with thicker super shoes had to adjust when World Athletics changed the rules. They even often let their sponsored athletes wear Nikes, sometimes with the branding removed, until they could develop their own super shoes with thinner soles.⁷

But over time, as brands adjusted to the new rules, they developed competitive models featuring carbon fibre and springy foam cushioning that met the standards.

So, if you think about it, World Athletics’ rules didn’t just level the playing field for athletes; they also gave super shoe brands a specific range to innovate and enhance their technology.⁸

As for races getting slower, that might not be the case either. Because back in 1954, British runner Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes.⁹ And he didn’t have super shoes, did he?

Until next time…

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Sources: Track & Field News [1], Deseret News [2], The Indian Express [3], Moulis Legal [4], NBC News [5], The Guardian [6], Bloomberg [7], Financial Times [8], CNN [9]

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