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)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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