Are pink trainers a form of doping?
World Athletics is to rule on Nike’s Vaporfly running shoe this week. The verdict could change the sport, write Matt Lawton and Rick Broadbent.
It had been at least two hours and 14 minutes since Brigid Kosgei had set a women’s world record and still runners were crossing the finish line of last year’s Chicago Marathon in wave after wave of the same expensive pink Nike trainers as the Kenyan.
Athletes of all shapes, sizes, ages and abilities had been seduced by Nike’s clever marketing spiel, spending
NZ$480 on a pair of these sneaky sneakers with their concealed carbon plates that make even joggers feel like they are ‘‘running on trampolines’’.
Many now blame that Vaporfly shoe for ruining track and field. They have forced World Athletics to consider rule changes that are due to be unveiled late this week because their impact on performance is being likened to mechanical doping.
‘‘Measured in the lab, verified with medals and records,’’ it says on the side of a midsole constructed from a material initially designed to propel tennis and golf balls but also now propelling humans at remarkable speed.
Sport is measured in tiny fractions – the ‘‘1 per centers’’ mentioned by sports coaches. But Nike claims its shoes offer a
4 per cent energy saving, thanks to a compound Nike calls ZoomX foam. It is made from a hi-tech polymer called Pebax, which first appeared in sport in the
1970s in the strings for tennis rackets.
Premium golf balls are constructed from a material that, when put in a running shoe, manages to protect and propel like a spring.
According to Nick Symmonds, a former Olympic middle-distance runner who performed a treadmill experiment in a pair of the latest Vaporfly Next% shoes (which Nike claims increase efficiency to 5 per cent) before then taking a scalpel to them, it is a combination of the foam and the stiff carbon plate that runs the full length of the shoe that creates the trampoline effect.
That race in Chicago provided a perfect illustration of Nike’s ubiquitous influence. Now, its science has allowed a woman to slash 81 seconds off Paula Radcliffe’s longstanding worldbest marathon mark.
The Alphafly shoe worn by Eliud Kipchoge to run his sub-two-hour marathon was an extreme version of the Vaporfly – an even deeper midsole said to accommodate three carbon plates – and will almost certainly be banned.
As will the shoe that Kosgei wore, if the suspicions of World Athletics officials are confirmed and her trainers were a modified version of the Next%. The regulations state that a shoe must not provide ‘‘an unfair advantage’’ but Kosgei’s record is expected to stand.
Nike’s new track spikes are at the prototype stage but are also likely to be outlawed. For some, however, any rule change that stops short of a blanket ban will not be enough.
It is worth listening to the fading dream of a runner who thought she had seen it all.
The British runner Jo Pavey has been hoping to make history by becoming the first distance runner from any nation to make a sixth Olympic Games. The trouble is she is not a Nike athlete.
At 46 and recovering from an operation on a thumb, which temporarily left her nil-bymouth, she knows Tokyo is a long shot. But if the mother-oftwo is up against people wearing variants of the Nike Vaporfly then that probably becomes impossible.
‘‘It’s a shame for the history of running,’’ Pavey said. ‘‘It’s fairly embarrassing that records have been broken in those shoes. It’s been massively frustrating for me, thinking I could get fit enough to have a stab at qualifying but knowing I won’t be running in those shoes.
‘‘In my career I’ve had to deal with all the doping and battling with people dishonestly taking thyroid medication. Now this shoe is another thing to contend with.’’
For rival manufacturers the situation is a nightmare, when the clock is counting down towards Tokyo.
‘‘We will welcome the introduction of new parameters,’’ a senior executive at one sports brand said this week. ‘‘Track and field needs to bring in the kind of rules that we saw introduced in other sports, like swimming. But it has taken too long to get to this point, and it makes it very difficult for designers to produce a new shoe in time for the Olympics in Tokyo. That means Nike athletes could still have an advantage.’’
Any attempt to imitate Nike’s designs is a complicated business, given how heavily patented the various Vaporfly shoes are. The Vaporfly foam is produced by a firm in the UK and is available only to Nike and Reebok. Other brands have tried to buy it and failed.
In Atlanta next month the Americans will stage their OIympic marathon trials. The top American woman last year was Sara Hall, who runs in Asics shoes.
Her husband, Ryan Hall, another elite runner, reacted to Kipchoge breaking the two-hour marathon barrier in the Alphafly with a blunt appraisal. ‘‘It is no longer a shoe, it’s a spring,’’ he said of a shoe that also boasts a 51mm stacked heel.
Pavey knows people at her local athletics club in Exeter, southwest England, who say Nike has helped them scythe huge chunks off their personal bests.
‘‘I don’t know what was going on in the head of World Athletics,’’ Pavey said. ‘‘Why was this left unchecked? It was a crazy situation that this shoe went into races where world records could be broken.
‘‘If they give the go-ahead now, then it ruins the whole
‘‘It is no longer a shoe, it’s a spring.’’
Ryan Hall, husband of top American marathoner Sara Hall
history of what’s been run. It’s getting rid of the purity of putting on a pair of shoes and going out to give it a go.’’
The counterargument is you can’t stop progress and the horse has bolted. Mary Wittenberg, who spent years as the director of the New York Marathon, said: ‘‘If these shoes are as good as we think, there will have to be asterisks and BV and AV marks in the record books – before Vaporfly and After Vaporfly.’’
The only man to offer a compromise solution so far is Geoff Burns, a kinesiology researcher at the University of Michigan. In
the British Journal of Sports
Medicine he proposed a maximum midsole thickness. He thinks that should be 28mm. Kipchoge’s shoe was close to double that.
Another man watching with interest is Kyle Barnes, assistant professor of movement science at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. In 2018 he did research on runners and the Nike Vaporfly 4% and found that
Nike had undersold its shoe. It actually gave the runner a 4.2 per cent energy efficiency advantage.
‘‘Any shoe has to be readily available for all but that’s not happening and it’s not happened for years,’’ he said. ‘‘The record Kosgei broke was not in a standard shoe and then there’s Laura Muir breaking records in a hybrid shoe. It’s happening everywhere.’’
There is potential conflict across the sport. World Athletics now has a deal with Asics until 2029, which was agreed after its president, Sebastian Coe, gave up his £100,000-a-year ambassadorial Nike role.
Next year, the World Championships head to the home of Nike in Eugene, Oregon, which got the nod from the former president of the governing body, Lamine Diack – now facing trial in France for corruption – without a formal bidding process.
Gianni Demadonna, the Italian former marathon champion who manages some of the biggest names in distance running, pointed out last year a subtle change to the wording of the regulations that appeared to accommodate Nike’s new designs.
Before June 2018 the rules stated that shoes must not give unfair additional assistance, ‘‘including by the incorporation of any technology’’. That line has now gone.
Demadonna represents a group of mainly Ethiopian athletes who wrote to the Athletics Integrity Unit last year calling for the Nike shoes to be examined by experts.
The repercussions are being felt around the world. Last week, an unheralded athlete called Derara Hurisa was a late addition to the Mumbai Marathon field. The Ethiopian normally runs in Adidas shoes but said he had lost them and so had to borrow a pair of Vaporflys from a friend. He won in a course record.
Now the athletics world has a decision to make about the pink shoes on millions of club runners’ wish lists.