CHENNAI: The second week of June was a watershed moment for the women’s 10000m event on track. Sifan Hassan smashed the world record set by Ethiopia’s Almaz Ayana on June 6. Hassan’s new mark of 29:06.82 took almost 10 seconds off 29:17.45 set by the Ethiopian in 2016. Some 48 hours later, Letesenbet Gidey went even faster. Her time was 29:01.03. The pattern followed a wider narrative that has been widely seen in competitive endurance racing this past year.
Sample this: since August 2020 alone, new times have been set in five endurance disciplines. Men’s and women’s 5000m and 10000m on track and men’s and women’s 5000m, 10000m and half-marathon events on road.
Why? The wider athletic community is beginning to refer to them as super spikes, game-changing shoe-technology that is allowing athletes to go faster than ever before. Even if World Athletics put in place new rules in 2019 to ensure records don’t fall once a week, it has not stopped from happening.
The other part of the equation is athletes on the wrong side of 30 going faster than ever before. The example of Shelly Ann-Fraser Pryce setting a new personal best (her 10.63 seconds she clocked on June 5 is the second-fastest ever run by a woman) in the 100m is a worthy example.
But athletes don’t want to talk about the technology that’s making them go like flash across the track. “I don’t know why they get crazy about technology,” Hassan told the media before the Diamond League meeting in Florence in June. “All of us have new phones before no one had telephones, so we have to go back to the radio to listen? What’s wrong with you people, just move on. We are a new generation, chill out, don’t just complain, just be positive, everybody, have fun.”
Joshua Cheptegei, the men’s 10000m world record holder was a bit more intimate but adopted the same attitude as he asked people to embrace technology. “I believe technology is changing the world,” he also said in Florence. “We are not living in the 1990s, we have to accept new innovations from new companies, new technologies, we have to go and live, it’s about the comfort that allows you to reach your dreams.”
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One can argue that the latest chapter in this arms race was the result of a dream. A sub two hour marathon. Wearing one of Nike’s futuristic shoes (called the AlphaFly), Eliud Kipchoge, one of the greatest marathoners in history, achieved the feat in 2019. Even though it didn’t count as a world record as it was a heavily controlled event, the technology had helped a human in breaking down one of the last great physical barriers known in all of sport.
Even if marathon and sprint shoes are different, it was only a matter of time before companies started to tweak it within the rules to help their elite runners go faster. Some have called it ‘technological’ or ‘mechanical doping’. Researcher Wouter Hoogkamer, who has co-authored a landmark paper on the subject of marathoners using advanced spikes, is more cautious.
“Different than marathon shoes, for the new spikes no scientific studies have been published. Most likely the big brands are working internally with their best athletes to develop and improve these times,” Hoogkamer, a faculty in Kinesiology at University of Massachusetts Integrative Locomotion Lab (UMILL), told this daily. “Studying the time savings of spikes on sprint and middle distance performances is also harder than that for marathon shoes as factors as acceleration, top speed and anaerobic energy pathways are not as easy to quantify in controlled conditions.”
Even if actual performances have shown that athletes are able to chalk off half-a-second to one second per each lap, Hoogkamer hasn’t seen them tested in a lab setting. “This mainly is a number based on actual performances by athletes, I haven’t seen any research that objectively quantified this.” His best theory for increased speeds even for sprinters is because of the foam on the shoes. “Since carbon fibre has been applied to sprint spikes for quite a while already, the recent improvements seem to be related to the foam, or at least the interaction between the carbon fibre plate and the foam.”
Hoogkamer, who has studied the interaction in a lab setting while doing his study on marathon runners, explains further. "(...) We studied the running mechanics of 10 runners and tested the bending stiffness of the shoes. This allowed us to quantify how much energy can be stored and returned in the carbon fiber plate, in bending. That study suggested that the curved carbon fiber plate mainly helps to save metabolic energy by stiffening the foot, without making running harder for the calf muscles. Furthermore, the foam does seem to contribute a lot more in energy storage and return than the plate."
However, he refuses to call it as mechanical doping. “As long as these technological advances stay within World Athletics regulations for footwear, they should not be considered technological doping.”
Nike, who answered a few questions posed by this daily, called it ‘ultimate meeting of sports science and purposeful design’. "This line of product is an example of how product design can capture the fascination of an entire sporting community and, more broadly, inspire new benchmarks of athletic potential. We want to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete and this is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential," a company spokesperson said.
To further ram home the quantifiable advantage that super spikes give, one only needs to listen to Usain Bolt. In an interview with the Guardian earlier this month, he said I would have run 100m 'below 9.5 seconds (his existing 100m world record is 9.58 seconds) for sure'.
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In Tokyo, both Kipchoge and Hassan among countless others will wear Nike's next generation super spikes (it’s important to state other companies have also been working on enhancing their own products so athletes belonging to their stable don't feel left out).
If, as expected, records fall at Tokyo’s National Stadium in the first week of August, there will be renewed focus on the super spikes.