Is this the fastest shoe in the world?

The Olympics are all about athletic supremacy. But the biggest and most prestigious sports show in the world is also a battleground for the world’s biggest shoe brands. And the fight for gold is well and truly underway after Monday’s big-ticket 100m finals, which the USA’s loud and proud Noah Lyles won by a mere five-thousandths of a second while wearing his Adidas Adizero Y-3 spikes. (Adidas, just give the boy what he wants now.)

In the women’s race, Julien Alfred of St Lucia defeated pre-race favourite Sha’Carri Richardson and cruised to the top of the podium wearing Puma, while high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh bagged Ukraine’s first individual gold for the same brand. New Balance-donning athletes Gabby Thomas and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone both won the 200m gold and 400m hurdles respectively. And if you thought Nike was nowhere in sight, you should know it got the rest of the spots on the podium for both the men’s and women’s 100m. In fact, on Thursday, the Nike spikes on Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo left Lyles in its jetstream in the men’s 200m final.

Clearly, the Olympics are a key opportunity for not only for the athletes, but the shoes they wear. How an athlete performs impacts a brand’s profits, perception, and reputation. Puma had a great run for almost a decade as its star athlete Usain Bolt broke world records in the sprint distances for three Olympics until he retired post Rio 2016. In Tokyo, there was a Bolt-shaped gap which Puma managed to fill when Italy’s Marcel Jacobs won the 100m gold in his black cat-branded spikes. In distance running, however, Nike has been outperforming its rivals thanks to Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge, who successfully defended his Rio 2016 gold medal in Tokyo 2020 and is looking to win again in Paris.

The flexing by these sports brands started long before any sports action got underway in Paris. New Balance covered the floors and walls of a metro station near Roland-Garros with its logos and brand ambassadors, including England and Arsenal footballer Bukayo Saka, whose image smiled down at visiting fans. Adidas set up a multipurpose play zone with a small basketball court outside the nodal Châtelet-Les-Halles station and plastered its distinctive three-striped branding everywhere. And Nike, the big one fighting hard to maintain its standing, used the façade of the Centre Pompidou as a canvas for its branding, opening an exhibition dedicated to the story of the Air Max 1.

Last time in Tokyo, most brands were playing catch-up with Nike’s carbon-plate technology, which had demonstrably improved the timings of long-distance runners like Kipchoge, who broke the marathon world record multiple times. Today, three years later, Nike’s challengers are not only traditional rivals Adidas, Puma, New Balance, and Asics, but also younger, hugely popular brands such as Hoka One One and the Swiss brand, On. “The playing field has levelled. Brands have caught up with each other, and you now have the sports governing body—specifically World Athletics—stipulating rules to control stack heights and the number of rigid plates,” explains Jose Van Der Veen, head of product line management for track and field, Puma North America. But the Paris Olympics are the first Summer Games of the carbon shoe era. Carbon-fibre plates, which once had fans, coaches, and even athletes divided, are now included across every brand’s track-and-field range, from sprint and distance running to jump events. 

Letsile Tebogo won Botswana's first Olympic gold medal in the 200m sprint

Since the last Olympics, most technological upgrades have happened in the foam that makes up the sole (rightly the soul) of the shoes and houses the carbon insertions. Traditionally, running spikes didn’t use any foam, but it’s now become a standard material in modern pairs. “We have seen more and more brands use foam in spikes and it has levelled the playing field,” adds Van Der Veen. Puma was one of the first to incorporate the hi-tech material, and while the brand has continued to fine-tune its high-performance Nitro Foam Elite, Nike and Adidas too have made significant strides with their latest versions of the ZoomX and Lightstrike Pro foams respectively, which are softer, lighter, and bouncier, and return a lot more energy on foot strike. The performance of the super footwear depends on how the rigid plates and foams interact with each other. And when carbon technology and advanced foams are combined, a super shoe is born.

Even though super shoes are helping decimate several world records and can help everyone run faster and jump higher, they simply cannot make everyone an athlete. It is a lot of Karsten Warholm and a little of Nitro foam that makes the Norwegian sprinter so good, notes Van Der Veen. “We enable our athletes to be the best possible versions of themselves. The Nitro Foam Elite not only helps them on the race day, but every single day of the year. [What it does is] enable them to keep training hard without getting injured. The race is what the world sees, but not the hard work that has been put into it.”

Clearly then, records are not being broken because of the new technology, but because of the hard work of each athlete. And when a new sporting record is created, the shoe that carried its wearer to new heights will be ready to cash in on it.