Athletics should embrace “super-shoes”

ACCORDING TO LEGEND, the first-ever marathon was so exhausting that Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who dashed the 25-odd miles (40-odd km) from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens to bring news of the victory over the Persians, collapsed and died. Over the subsequent 2,500 years, humans have become better at running that distance. Some even choose to do so dressed as rhinos. The very best now complete the modern marathon, all 26.219 miles of it, in a little over two hours. (Pheidippides’s time went unrecorded.)

Over the past five years the best times have improved dramatically—and more of the same will no doubt follow at the New York City marathon on November 5th. This can to a large extent be explained by the development of a new generation of hyper-bouncy running shoes—“super-shoes”—that offer athletes greater assistance. Such has been the improvement that some have questioned whether the technology is now too dominant and therefore whether the recent glut of fast times should be scrubbed from the records. This technophobia is misplaced.

The latest examples of bewilderingly quick marathon times were set on the flat roads of Berlin and Chicago. In Germany, Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia clocked 2 hours, 11 minutes, 53 seconds, obliterating the existing women’s record by more than two minutes. Eight of the ten fastest times in the history of female marathon-running have been recorded since the start of 2022. Then, in the Windy City, Kenya’s Kelvin Kiptum crossed the line at 2:00:35, lowering the men’s bar by 34 seconds. (The picture shows Mr Kiptum’s feet after his victory.) A stripling of 23—top marathon-runners are usually older—Mr Kiptum will probably become the first person to break the two-hour mark. And if he does not manage it, one of his contemporaries will. Six of the ten fastest men’s times ever have been recorded in the past two years.

There is little doubt that this generation of athletes are breaking records because of their footwear. Both Nike and Adidas have persuaded the governing body, World Athletics, to permit shoes with chunky, foam soles. These act as springs. When their feet compress the super-shoes into the ground, the runners receive more energy as they push off again than they would with regular shoes. In 2017 Nike announced that the new technology allowed athletes in super-shoes to use 4% less energy than they would if wearing a regular shoe.

Those who would like the shoes banned worry that the balance between the runners’ ability and the kit they wear has become skewed. (A lesser concern is that records become less comparable with times from previous eras. But unless today’s runners race in ancient clodhoppers, that will always be the case.) Plainly, though, this is a long way from shoes that matter more than runners. A club runner may set a personal best in a pair of Nike Alphaflys, but she is not going to outrun Ms Assefa shod in regular running shoes. World Athletics, the sport’s governing body, insists that all such super-shoes should be available to all athletes in order to be legal, so there is no risk of results being determined by a lack of access to the best equipment. (Some people disingenuously equate super-shoes with doping, even though, unlike many chemicals, technical enhancements typically have no ill effects on their users.)

Part of the appeal of sports is that they show humans on an upward trajectory, becoming stronger, faster and fitter. This matters most in individual sports where competitors race against the clock, but it applies across the board. Technology has always contributed to this. Pristine modern football pitches enable a higher level of skill; bouncier tracks propel athletes along faster. But as the sports industry has sucked in more investment and prize pots have expanded, the incentives to find an edge in performance have grown, whether in kit, diet or game strategy. Sometimes advances have to be reined in—restrictions were placed on cricket-bat technology, for example, to prevent skewing the game in favour of batters; javelins were made less aerodynamic to save spectators from a spearing. But banning super-shoes would be both regressive and difficult to enforce. This is a genie that cannot be returned to its shoebox.

Swimming offers a cautionary tale. At the 2008 Olympics, world records were smashed by swimmers wearing full-body polyurethane suits manufactured by Speedo, which improved buoyancy. Many of the same arguments levelled against the Speedo suits have been heard again in the super-shoe debate. Swimming’s governing body, FINA, caved in to the critics and banned the suits in 2010. For the next few years swimmers were unable to match the feats of Beijing. But as time passed and improvements were made elsewhere, new performers began to catch up. Now only one of the women’s world records set in a Speedo suit still stands. Ms Assefa and Mr Kiptum are astonishing athletes and we should marvel at their feats, not what’s on their feet. In the future, their records, too, will be surpassed by ever more impressive achievements.■