Nonetheless, the degree to which Nike has leveraged Eliud Kipchoge’s celebrity to promote its most premium shoe feels like an outlier-unsurprising, perhaps, since there’s never been a distance running celebrity quite like him. In an episode of the Coffee Club podcast, On-sponsored runners Ollie Hoare and Geordie Beamish chatted with Jordan Donnelly, the brand’s head of product creation, about the process of creating track spikes for high-level competition. Under Armour recently published a press release about how it tested prototypes in in-race scenarios with its Dark Sky Distance team. A 2014 article in the New York Times on the Saucony Human Performance and Innovation Lab depicts elite runner Ben True (who was sponsored by the company at the time) ripping 4:20 miles on a $100,000 treadmill while covered in tiny lights for gait analysis. Most shoe brands work with their sponsored elites for product testing, and at Nike the practice has its legacy in eventual co-founder Bill Bowerman making footwear for his athletes at the University of Oregon back in the fifties and sixties. The Vaporfly has a tweaked version of one of Nike’s slogans printed on its upper, informing us that it’s been “Engineered to the exact specifications of world-class runners.” On the one hand there’s nothing particularly new or unusual about this. The company makes a point of emphasizing how much this seismic innovation is indebted to input from elite athletes. For better or worse, it was impossible to deny that Nike had spawned an industry-wide shift in racing shoes. Soon, every major running shoe company developed a premium racer whose design seemed to follow the blueprint of offsetting max cushioning with a stiff plate. As it turned out, however, all the noise about the ur-super shoe was empirically validated athletes of every level who wore it were suddenly running faster times.

When Nike was hyping the launch of its Vaporfly 4% running shoe in 2017, there was some skepticism about the company’s claims of having invented a product that would dramatically improve running economy.

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