Running on plenty: I love my ‘super shoes’ but here’s why they should be banned

If you sidled up to any athlete at a track event and offered them something that could instantly make them 4 per cent faster, they would probably assume you were offering them a performance-enhancing drug.

They would be amazed, however, if you were to insist that what you were selling was perfectly legal, and even accepted and regulated by all the appropriate sporting authorities. Even better, your wonder product cost no more than a few hundred pounds. The athlete would get their cash out in seconds, because a 4 per cent improvement in running time is a huge gain, something that could take months or years of training to achieve.

Anyone watching the Berlin Marathon on Sunday would have seen such a product in action. It could be spotted on the feet of the Ethiopian runner Tigist Assefa, who won the race in 2hr 11min 53sec, thereby absolutely obliterating the women’s world record by a massive 2min 11sec. What Assefa was wearing was none other than a pair of Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s, which are made by Adidas and cost £400. While such a price might seem steep for your average park runner, for any competitive athlete – let alone someone world class – that price is a pure bargain.

In the world of sports science, such footwear is known as TARS (technologically advanced running shoes). More commonly known as super shoes, these are typically trainers that feature massively spongey soles that are often embedded with carbon fibre plates, and, to put it quite simply, make you run faster – a lot faster.

While there can be no doubt Assefa is a phenomenally talented athlete, the margin of 1.6 per cent by which she broke the world record does raise serious questions over whether such footwear should be allowed.

Over the past few years, ever since the arrival of Nike’s groundbreaking Vaporfly, and then the Alphafly, records have been tumbling at an astonishing rate, and by equally astonishing margins. Until December 2020, for example, it was thought likely that the record men’s half-marathon time would stay at 58 minutes. That was destroyed by Kibiwott Kandie in 57min 32sec. Any marathon aficionado will of course know that Eliud Kipchoge famously ran the world’s first sub two-hour marathon back in October 2019 while wearing super shoes. Although that record is not official because the authorities deemed his Nike Alphaflys just a bit too super, it showed quite how devastatingly effective these shoes really are.

As a keen and very amateur runner, I know this from first-hand experience. It was only when I started wearing Vaporflys, which cost over £200, that my 5k and 10k record times melted away overnight. My 5k went from 19min 21sec to 18min 29 and then to below 18min, while my 10k went from 40min 32sec to 38min 42sec to under 38min. These were initial margins of over 4 per cent, which is almost exactly the figure that Nike claims its shoes can improve one’s ‘running economy’. Interestingly, Adidas also makes similarly coy claims for its super shoes, by stating that they improve ‘the wearer’s running economy’, and provide ‘greater energy return for runners’.

Such language is essentially euphemistic for the unarguable fact these shoes are essentially springs that bounce the runner along the track. Wearing them makes you feel like you are walking on the moon, and it is little wonder that the adoption of these shoes is sometimes called “mechanical” or “technological doping”. In a conversation in running circles, the term is far more informal and blatant, as they are often jocularly and knowingly referred to as “cheat’s shoes”. In essence, they are an athletic guilty pleasure. Everybody knows that they boost your times far too much, but because they are legal everybody is wearing them, and so you have to wear them as well.

Is it possible to turn back the clock and ban super shoes? It is surely too late, as the shoes have been allowed in competitions for too long, and a ban would also raise the unanswerable question of what shoe technology is permissible. And as well as shoes, how about nutritional science? Or physiotherapy? What is the point at which athletic performance starts to owe more to technology than to grit and effort?

While we can probably never know, what is surely recognisable is when tech starts to take the mick. Assefa’s record is a wonderful thing, but would she have beaten the world record, let alone smashed it, if her shoes weren’t quite so super? Deep down, we all know the answer.