Technology setting pace, but is there unfair edge?

In the past year, as the world grappled with the coronavirus disease pandemic, distance running was quietly taking some long strides forward. Since June 2020, the men’s and women’s world records in both 5000m and 10,000m have all fallen. The last to fall was on June 6, when Sifan Hassan, a runner from Netherlands, shaved nearly 10 seconds off the previous 10,000m record to post a blistering time of 29.06.82.

Two things connect the records: all four runners wore Nike’s Vaporfly shoes and the races featured pace setting lights. Both developments have led to plenty of controversy in the sporting world. (There is another connection between the record setters, but more about that later).

First, the lights. Developed by a Dutch company, a series of lights line a track and flash ahead or behind a passing runner to indicate the runner’s pace difference with a set time. In the case of the 5000m and 10,000m records, the lights were set to the world record times.

Pacing is of critical importance for endurance events, especially for those ahead of the pack. Instead of relying on their internal rhythm, Ethiopia’s 22-year-old Letesenbet Gidey (5000m women’s WR) and Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei (10,000m men’s WR) could chase the flashing lights and eventually overtake them to set their records. Cheptegei underplayed the role the light played in the run. Clearly, the lights, which will not be in use at the Tokyo Olympics, do not offer an unfair advantage — they are there for all runners to see.

The shoe debate has refused to die down. It began as a whisper in 2016, when, at the 2016 Olympic marathon, all three medallists in the men’s race climbed the podium in identical shoes — a Nike prototype soon to be released as the Vaporfly. It exploded as Nike and the world’s finest marathoner, Eliud Kipchoge, pulled off arguably the greatest publicity act in the history of the sport by running a marathon in under two hours on a misty morning in Vienna in 2019.

Why are these shoes controversial? Critics point to two things. One is that the proprietary technology violates a World Athletics rule that says any equipment used should be reasonably accessible. The second is that the technology is so advanced that it tampers with the integrity of the sport itself. The outrage peaked into a call for banning these shoes from official events — in August 2020, WA was forced to rule on the issue. Instead of banning the shoes, they introduced a cap on heel thickness on the soles.

WA was right not to ban the shoes. What exactly is this new technology that’s so pathbreaking? The Nike shoes feature two unique design elements — one is a thin carbon plate inserted into the midsole, the other is a kind of foam used in aerospace tech that’s lighter and springier than anything else being used in shoes. Though the reason why these shoes work so well is yet to be understood (Nike says it has to do with transfer of energy from the runner’s strides), a paper published in the journal Frontiers of Sports and Active Living found that they do indeed contribute significant decreases in race timings.

But does the new technology confer an unfair advantage? Not really. The technology is not even new. In 2007, when Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie set the then marathon world record of 2:04:26, he wore something called the Adidas Proplate, a shoe that featured a carbon fibre plate in the midsole. After Nike introduced the Vaporfly, every manufacturer launched a long-distance running pair with carbon plates.

New technology that helps break old records is the norm in sports. In running, when cinder block tracks were replaced with a synthetic material, records toppled. There’s hardly anything in common between a racing bike that will be used at the Tokyo Olympics and the ones that were used in 1964, except the framework. Imagine Roger Federer playing with a wooden racket.

In 2008 and 2009, swimming world records were broken more than 130 times by athletes wearing a new full-body suit developed by Speedo that reduced drag. Swimming’s world body had no choice but to ban the suit in 2010. It would be reasonable to expect then, that those records still stand. Of the 40 major swimming records across men and women, only 12 remain from that “supersuit” period.

Which brings us to the runners themselves, and the third thing that connects the four new world records — in fact, it connects every single runner’s name mentioned so far in this piece.

They all come from East Africa; in fact, they come from a small gene pool that belongs to an area called the Great Rift Valley (Hassan is from Ethiopia and was taken in as a 15-year-old refugee by the Netherlands). Scores of studies have shown that the people of the Great Rift Valley have certain innate characteristics that make them superb endurance runners. That’s nature. The next step is a culture of running and a highquality training atmosphere — that’s nurture.

Technology still can’t transcend a combination of the two.