How hi-tech running shoes – and a bouncy track – are set to rewrite the Olympics record book
It’s not just unlimited talent and skill that can help athletes achieve gold – their footwear can too. And behind the scenes, the battle of the shoes shows no sign of abating, writes Ben Bloom
In May, ahead of her first appearance of the season at the Eugene Diamond League, Keely Hodgkinson made her annual visit to her sponsor Nike’s headquarters in Oregon. Hodgkinson, like many of Nike’s top athletes, has been instrumental in the recent evolution of athletics spikes, offering feedback on what she feels works and what does not.
On this occasion, she was alongside Team GB 1,500m teammate Georgia Bell and their coach Trevor Painter when the shoe boffins brought out their latest prototype.
“Everyone in the room, when they got them out, said, at the same time: ‘What the f*** are they?’” recalls Painter. “They are like high-heeled shoes – really thin at the back. Like something from ‘Back to the Future’. They are a bit weird, but they’ll probably set the world alight when they come out in the next few years.”
Whether this particular revolutionary design comes to fruition remains to be seen, but the arms race in shoe innovation shows no signs of abating. Continued footwear advancement combined with improvements in track technology has left many believing records could soar at the Paris Olympics, as they have done in various events over recent years.
Hodgkinson, a firm favourite for Olympic 800m gold, will wear Nike’s latest iteration of their middle-distance Air Zoom Victory super spikes, which evolved from prototypes first worn at the 2019 World Championships and were subsequently rolled out to the masses after the Covid pandemic. The combination of carbon fibre plates and ultra-springy foam was a game-changer.
For a period at the start, something of an omerta existed among the best athletes, who were unwilling to attribute their success – and, on many occasions, their sudden time improvement – to footwear. That reluctance has now largely passed, replaced by a widespread acknowledgement of just how much shoe technology has helped athletes run faster in recent years.
Painter is entirely open about it, no doubt driven in large part by the career of his wife Jenny Meadows, who now sits just 10th on the British all-time 800m list after six athletes surpassed her best time in the last three years alone.
“Without this progression in technology you wouldn’t see the times that we’re getting,” he says. “I do feel sorry for the athletes that have gone in the past because they didn’t have those shoes. What could they have actually done if they had them as well?”
It is unthinkable that any top-level athlete would now not wear the latest super spikes, regardless of their personal feelings on the matter. When he broke the 400m hurdles world record at the Tokyo Olympics, Norway’s Karsten Warholm hit out at his main rival Rai Benjamin’s Nike spikes, saying: “If you put a trampoline [in the shoes] I think it’s bull****, and I think it takes credibility away from our sport.”
Recently, Warholm acknowledged to The Guardian that he was the “biggest hypocrite in the whole world”, having been forced to embrace technology and now wearing bizarre Puma spikes that feature a toe flap which sticks out the end of the shoe. Amid suggestions that it looks like a bottle opener, Warholm posted a light-hearted video on social media using the shoe to open a bottle of beer.
If what the athletes wear on their feet is likely to propel them to ever quicker times, the surface they will be stepping on is designed to do precisely the same. Immediately after competing at the Tokyo Games three years ago, the response from athletes was uniform.
“That track is crazy,” said Warholm. “It’s a phenomenal track,” said Benjamin. “You can feel the difference,” said Sydney McLaughlin, who had broken the women’s 400m hurdles world record.
That Tokyo track, like the one awaiting them in Paris, was designed by Mondo, the Italian manufacturers who have delivered every Olympic surface since 1976. The one in Tokyo, they claimed, provided a 1 to 2 per cent improvement on previous models. Mondo believes the latest version in Paris is that much better again.
Made from 50 per cent recycled materials, it features a solid rubber top layer which rests above a lower level containing honeycomb cells that absorb impact and feed the energy back into the foot.
As with the vast sums ploughed into shoe technology by all the leading manufacturers, all of this comes at a cost, with the Paris track estimated to have cost somewhere in the region of £2m.
That kind of bill was too much for the likes of Birmingham City Council, who opted against installing the top-of-the-range track option produced by their chosen manufacturer Beynon when they redeveloped the Alexander Stadium for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, instead plumping for a cheaper, more resilient, model.
“The track was not quick,” said Jamaican 100m sprinter Yohan Blake after competing in the Diamond League there that year. “I didn’t feel the bounce that I normally get.”
That is not expected to be the case in the French capital where the local organising committee have spared no expense in their bid to produce faster times than ever at these Olympics.
As for whether all of these external aids are a good thing, that comes down to personal preference. Despite his sympathy for previous generations who had to make do without, Painter believes such “ingenuity” provides “an exciting time for the sport”.
World Athletics president Seb Coe has previously admitted to feeling “genuinely torn” about technological advancement, adding that his “natural instinct is not to try and strangle innovation”.
Over the coming week, the world could see just how much that technology is altering the sport’s historical parameters.
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