Tokyo is shaping as the Olympic Games where celebrated times in distance running will go to die, writes chief reporter Chip Le Grand Melbchief
Bideau says there is no question that some runners are running faster partly because of the new shoes. One consequence of this is our middle and distance running team, which qualified for Tokyo against times set before the impact of the shoe technology was appreciated, is larger than it would otherwise have been.
Nike’s Vaporfly shoes came to prominence in 2018 when athletes wearing them broke world records in half-marathon, marathon and 100-kilometre road events., on a cool morning in Vienna, laced up a pair of custom-made Vaporflys and bounced his way to the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon. Australian marathon legend Robert de Castella likened it to running with springs on your feet.
The shoe revolution spread into track running with the introduction of the Nike Dragonfly spikes. These were the shoes Ethiopian-born Dutch runner Sifan Hassan wore last week when she took more than 10 seconds off the astonishing 10-kilometre world record set by Almaz Ayana at the Rio Olympics. Hassan’s record stood for only 48 hours before Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey sliced another six seconds off her mark.
Geoffrey Burns, a University of Michigan biomechanics researcher and ultra-distance runner, expresses discomfort at the way in which times, the essential currency of running, are being recalibrated in a sport resistant to technological change. He estimates that over 10,000 metres, shoe technology is reducing times by up to 30 seconds.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has placed the regulatory debate in a holding pattern until Tokyo. Whether athletics follows swimming, cycling and sailing in outlawing technology previously accepted in the sport will depend on what we see in six weeks.
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