NKE Nike Inc

By Rachel Bachman 

Waltham, Mass.

Running-shoe companies pay top distance runners six-figure amounts to wear their products -- and, the companies hope, to climb a podium after a big-time race like the U.S. Olympic marathon trials Saturday in Atlanta.

But a radical new Nike shoe design has spurred such upheaval in the running world that companies are beginning to rethink the unthinkable. The head of one company, Saucony, said she would even be open to allowing one of her sponsored runners to wear a competitor's shoes if the athlete felt he'd be at a disadvantage if he didn't.

"We would have to consider that," Saucony president Anne Cavassa said in a recent interview.

Distance running has arrived at this mind-bending moment thanks to Nike's controversial Vaporfly shoes. Runners have racked up records wearing the high-tech design, which features an unusually thick sole with a carbon-fiber plate. Research has shown they can help runners improve race times by roughly 2.5%.

On Jan. 31, World Athletics, track and field's governing body, published rules limiting shoes' sole thickness to no more than 40 millimeters and allowing carbon-fiber plates only within a continuous plane. The ruling effectively rendered Nike's pioneering shoes legal.

The ruling also required that any prototypes that runners want to wear in the Tokyo Olympic marathons on Aug. 8 and 9 must be available at retail by April 30. Meeting that requirement is suddenly even more difficult as Chinese manufacturers and suppliers combat the coronavirus.

Competing brands have scrambled to build shoes to compare with the Vaporfly. On Monday, five days before the marathon trials, Brooks announced the Hyperion Elite 2, a shoe it says will be available publicly just before April 30.

Saucony (SOCK-uh-knee) designers say they're confident in their first carbon-fiber plate shoe, the Endorphin Pro, but acknowledge that everyone's playing catch-up. But with the recent rule change, nearly everyone in distance running is racing to adjust.

The industry turmoil began when mysterious prototypes appeared at the 2016 U.S. Olympic marathon trials. They morphed into the Nike Zoom Vaporfly Elite, seemingly magical shoes that helped set records.

Competitor concerns about the shoes mounted, and World Athletics formed a group in early 2019 to study the issue. But what the governing body saw as careful deliberation, many athletes and brands saw as frustrating silence on an issue central to competition: Did Nike's shoes provide an unfair aid that the rules had long prohibited?

"I think trying to regulate after the fact, and after brands have gone a myriad of different directions to try to solve the runners' problems and make runners faster, doesn't necessarily work," said Shawn Hoy, VP of global product for Saucony and a former Nike employee. "And I'll be a little bit cheeky here: especially when the head of the governing body has a building named after him at Nike."

Hoy was referring to World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, a former Nike-sponsored 1,500-meter runner who stepped down as a Nike ambassador in 2015. Skeptics still question World Athletics' objectivity, especially after Nike announced days after the ruling that its next model, the Alphafly, would just slide under the new limits.

A spokeswoman for World Athletics said Coe wasn't part of the group that drafted the new regulations, nor did he vote as part of the World Athletics Council's approval.

"No shoe company was directly involved in shaping the regulations," the spokeswoman said.

A Nike spokeswoman said Coe was one of the first athletes, in the 1970s, to compete in Nikes and "the building on campus is named in well-deserved recognition of his inspiring performances and contributions to the sport." She said the World Athletics shoe rules will "stifle innovation over the long term."

The ruling has made footwear an important factor in this weekend's trials.

Contenders sponsored by Nike include Galen Rupp, who finished third in the marathon at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and Jordan Hasay, a women's favorite. (Nike athlete Amy Cragg recently withdrew due to an illness.)

Jared Ward, a Saucony-sponsored athlete who finished sixth in Rio, said he was skeptical that Nike's Vaporflys could make much difference in running times even as runners racked up personal bests wearing them. Then he helped conduct research on the shoe himself. Ward, who is also an adjunct statistics professor at BYU, contributed to a study published last year that found the Vaporflys did give runners a measurable advantage over traditional shoes.

Fortunately for Ward, Saucony had been experimenting for years with the kind of lighter-weight foams used in the Vaporfly. In late 2018, Saucony sent him three prototypes with carbon-fiber plates that he tested with one-mile paced runs at a BYU lab in Provo, Utah, while monitoring his oxygen uptake -- a common measure of exertion.

"Third one, I finished the interval and I ripped off the mask and said, 'Those are the ones,'" Ward recalled. The shoe performed 4.4% better than the others, he said.

Five days later Ward wore the prototypes to finish sixth at the 2018 New York City Marathon, first among American men. A year and more than two dozen prototypes later, Saucony announced the Endorphin Pro, which Ward will wear in the trials. The foam in the shoe's sole is about 50% lighter than the type used in Saucony's traditional running shoes.

The new wave of shoe design doesn't work for everybody. Saucony-sponsored Molly Huddle said that in lab tests with the Endorphin Pro, "I did get a little bit of an economy boost, but not as big as some other people did." The thick soles also irritated weakness in her ankle, she said.

She said she'll probably wear the Saucony Fastwitch at the marathon trials, a shoe with a sole about half as thick as the Endorphin Pro. Huddle takes heart that she's gone toe-to-toe with Vaporfly-wearing runners in the past, including in a third-place finish at the 2016 New York City Marathon.

"I'm hoping that the team isn't decided by technology," she said. "You want the athletes to feel good about what they did, you know. Even the Nike athletes."

Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 25, 2020 09:53 ET (14:53 GMT)

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