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The second week of the Paris Olympics will be all about athletics. Over the coming days, more than a thousand athletes will go toe to toe in the hopes of being crowned the fastest runner over distances that range from 100 metres to the marathon. But there’s a problem: thanks to so-called “super shoes”, we may not know if the person who crosses the line first really is the fastest runner in the truest sense of the word.
The build-up to every modern Olympic Games is peppered with stories about athletics tracks and swimming pools painstakingly designed for setting records (though the pool used in Paris this year is unusually slow). But any performance boosts these give are shared by all competitors.
Then came the arrival of the first super shoes in 2016, which accelerated road-running events like the marathon. The launch of their track-optimised “super spikes” cousin a few years later is now having a similar effect on the longest races run inside the stadium.
At first glance, this explosion in the use of super shoes appears to have sent times tumbling across the board, with performances once considered the mark of all-time greatness rapidly becoming unremarkable. But the advances in shoe technology have one crucial difference to the other technological tweaks that have modernised sports over the years. The benefits are not evenly distributed among competitors — even for those wearing the same shoes.
The default comparison for sports in which engineering exerts a growing influence is Formula One, where the car plays an outsize role in determining the results and the sporting contest is between teams, not individuals. But in the case of F1 the same car would provide the same boost to different drivers.
With super shoes, however, some runners get huge boosts while others find the cutting-edge footwear knocks them off their stride.
Study after study has found that this variation between “hyper-responders” — those whose physiology or running style combines with the shoes to maximum benefit — and “non-responders” spans several percentage points. In races that are typically decided by much less than half a percentage point, that can be the difference between gold medal and also-ran.
This variation in the advantage conferred by the shoes is akin to a new F1 racing car that is able to help left-handed people drive faster while slowing down right-handed drivers.
A key aspect of the boost that super shoes provide comes from the way in which they absorb and return energy from each stride, effectively putting a spring in the runner’s step. This means runners with longer and more loping strides will be affected differently to those with a flatter gait. The interaction between different athletes’ biomechanics and their footwear may explain why women have tended to get bigger boosts then men.
The result is that over the next week, we won’t really know whether the competitors with the fastest times are the fastest runners, or the fastest runners-plus-a-particular-pair-of-shoes. As sports scientist Ross Tucker puts it, it’s not only possible but likely that if you took two elite athletes each wearing a different pair of elite shoes, and swapped their footwear, you would get a different race result.
Athletic ability is already determined in part by differences in physiology and biomechanics. The question is whether we’re now OK with differences that did not previously matter suddenly becoming pivotal as a result of new technology.
The situation is not without precedent. In 2008, Speedo’s revolutionary low-friction LZR swimsuits saw dozens of swimming records smashed. The suits were swiftly banned and the tech abandoned — not because they gave an advantage to the wearer, but because the size of that advantage varied depending on the wearer’s size and body shape.
Sport needs commercial innovation, both to sustain interest and provide funding. In the case of super shoes, we also appear to be too far down the road to turn back. So be it. The podium will now be topped by the best human-shoe cyborg, not necessarily by the fastest runner.
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