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Tigst Assefa and Benson Kipruto are aiming to slash minutes off their PBs in the new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 2 - Adidas
It is the lightest and most expensive marathon running shoe in history and, at its launch in the shadow of Trafalgar Square on Thursday night, there was also a collective certainty about its most important quality.
“We do believe it’s the fastest,” said Charlotte Heidmann, the senior product manager at Adidas, of the new £450 and 138 gram Adizero Adios Pro Evo 2 ‘super shoe’ that will make its London debut on Sunday.
Its predecessor, the Pro Evo 1, made global headlines in 2023 when it helped Tigst Assefa slash almost two minutes off the women’s world record before its athletes dominated last year’s London Marathon. It promptly sold out from official outlets, with pairs of the shoe then appearing on resale sites for £2,500.
The first athlete to trial the shoes had actually been Benson Kipruto, who was training at home in Kenya when Heidmann arrived after one session with a prototype pair in her backpack.
“They probably thought: ‘Huh, another racing shoe.’ But I said: ‘Wait until you feel it’,” recalled Heidmann. “I handed over the shoe to Benson Kiputo and he was the first tester. He couldn’t believe his eyes – he was, ‘but is there something missing?’ He did 25km the next day and then ran away with the shoe, hid it in his room, and didn’t want to give it back.”
Heidmann eventually retrieved the shoe with the promise that a fully developed version would soon be available and it was duly on Kipruto’s feet last summer when he beat Great Britain’s Emile Cairess to the bronze medal behind the winner Tamirat Tola at the Paris Olympic marathon. Cairess and Tola were also wearing the Pro Evo 1s.
Adidas say they have now found a further five per cent increase in energy return with this latest development, largely due to adding foam and noticeable bulk (if not weight) around the midsole “engine” of the shoe where most elite runners’ feet strike the ground.
It will be worn among others on Sunday by Assefa and Tola, as well as the defending men’s champion Alex Mutiso. The shoe does not go on general sale until August 28 but has been selectively released and pairs were being passed around at Thursday’s launch like some sort of rare jewel. A feel of one pair – marked number 1,211 of a batch of 2,037 – certainly confirmed its jaw-dropping feather-like feel.
The claim of ‘fastest’, however, was also made earlier this month by Puma, who have just launched the new Fast-R Nitro Elite 3, and have backed up their assertion with research showing improvements in running economy on previous super shoes of more than three per cent.
And then there is of course Nike, inventors of the first carbon-reinforced super shoes which swept the Rio Olympics in 2016, and whose Alphafly 3 model was worn by both Kelvin Kiptum and Ruth Chepngetich when they set the current men’s and women’s world marathon records, as well as Olympic women’s champion Sifan Hassan, who is going for a second London win on Sunday.
A new Alphafly 4 prototype of this design – with its Zoom-X foam and Air Zoom units – will be worn by Nike athletes on Sunday, including marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge and the Ugandan Jacob Kiplimo, who has just shattered the world half-marathon record and is making his eagerly awaited debut over 26.2 miles.
Many believe that Kiplimo will become the first man to break two hours in an official race. With the various teams of scientists now reporting the biggest set of advances in super shoes since their game-changing emergence almost a decade ago, it all adds up to the most intriguing of sub-plots this weekend.
And, while champions of yesteryear can rightly point out that it has become impossible to fairly compare their times with the generation that is now rewriting the record books, it is a revolution that has positively transformed distance running from top to bottom.
With the shoe brands investing millions in highly secretive research and design – and sales booming – athletes are seeing the trickle-down in the value and scope of their shoe deals. Recovery also appears to be improved in super shoes, helping people to run more as well as faster. The London Marathon itself is now constantly finding that it must upgrade its ‘good for entry’ times for amateur runners in response to the general quickening of the entire field.
‘You can’t run away from the technology’
Kipchoge, who has worked closely with Nike on technological advances, stressed ahead of Sunday’s marathon that the various super shoes are there to maximise the energy that a runner has already produced rather than provide artificial boosts.
“If you are not fit enough, even with these shoes, you can’t run fast,” he told Telegraph Sport. “First it’s the fitness. If you are physically fit and mentally fit, the technology can run with you. The world is changing and that includes technology. You can’t run away from it. We need to move with the shoes and, above all, enjoy running.”
Mahamed Mahamed, who is the leading Briton in the men’s race and third on the domestic all-time list behind only Mo Farah and Emile Cairess, will be in the new Puma super shoe on Sunday
“It’s lighter, more comfortable and the design itself is better,” he said. He will certainly also have drawn encouragement from the performance in them at the Boston Marathon earlier this week of Rory Linkletter, the Canadian who ran a 59-second personal best to finish sixth.
It should be stressed that the recent comparison study of shoes was funded by Puma and included the Adidas Pro Evo 1 and Nike Alphafly 3s, rather than their latest versions which will be largely worn on Sunday. Even so, the results do underline the ongoing improvements across the various brands.
Wouter Hoogkamer, who is the assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts, identified the much-advertised four per cent upgrade in the original Nike Vaporfly and was among tho co-authors of the new Puma study. “These are substantial differences,” he said. “You’re talking about minutes off a marathon time – and I train years to shave a minute off of my marathon time.”
Mutiso, the Kenyan who is aiming to defend his London title, says that he feels an even greater response in the Pro Evo 2. “Last year I won with the Pro Evo 1 and it [the Pro Evo 2] is slightly different,” he says. “I trained with both for some sessions and I liked it more.”
Adidas have been open about the shoe’s limitations with respect to longevity. Mutiso says that he would probably not run more than 70km in a pair before a race although it is stressed that this is all highly individual. They share the same carbon reinforced rods as the more affordable and seemingly durable Adidas Adizero Adios Pro 3 and 4 range (retailing at £220) – the Pro Evos have a different and much lighter foam which is made out of an undisclosed compound.
“We say they are optimised for race day – they are built to break world records… it’s for the pinnacle of racing and for the pinnacle of athlete,” says Moritz Höllmüller, the Adidas design manager, of a shoe that “combines art and science” and was a fusion of feedback and real-life testing at high altitude in the Kenyan town of Iten and the Adidas laboratories at their main headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
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