A Shoe Ran So Fast It Nearly Got Banned

In 2019, athletes wearing one specific brand of running shoe took 31 of the 36 podium spots across the world’s six biggest marathons.

That’s not a small edge, but near-total domination by a single piece of footwear, and it forced athletics’ governing body to seriously consider banning the shoe entirely.

A shoe built to make runners faster

Nike’s Vaporfly shoes, first released in 2017, combined a thick, bouncy foam sole with a stiff carbon-fiber plate hidden inside. Independent testing found the shoes could make runners roughly 4 percent faster than standard racing shoes, an enormous improvement in a sport where races are often won or lost by fractions of a percent.

Eliud Kipchoge wore an even more advanced prototype version, later called the Alphafly, when he became the first person ever to run a marathon distance in under two hours in 2019.

That achievement made global headlines, but it also intensified a growing argument already building across the sport: was this genuine human achievement, or was the shoe itself doing too much of the work?

The pushback

Critics, including rival shoe companies and many professional runners not sponsored by Nike, argued the technology had crossed a line, turning what should be a pure test of human running ability into what one expert called “an arms race” between shoe manufacturers rather than between athletes. Athletes not sponsored by Nike suddenly faced a genuine competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own training or talent, simply because of which shoes they had access to.

World Athletics, the sport’s governing body, spent months investigating before finally announcing new rules in January 2020. They set a maximum sole thickness of 40 millimeters and limited shoes to just one rigid plate inside the sole.

Crucially, the specific prototype Kipchoge wore to break the two-hour barrier was ruled illegal for future competition, since it exceeded the new limits.

A compromise, not a full ban

The standard Vaporfly shoes that had already dominated podiums in 2019 were still allowed to compete, since they fit within the new rules. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe explained the reasoning simply: the goal wasn’t to regulate the entire sports shoe market, just to protect fairness at the elite level by drawing a clear line for what’s allowed.

That compromise satisfied almost nobody completely. Purists still argue the current rules allow too much technological advantage. Shoe companies argue the rules are reasonable and still allow genuine innovation. Runners, meanwhile, have kept buying and racing in the shoes regardless, since every major brand now makes some version of the same basic technology.

A new normal that used to be controversial

What looked like a genuine crisis for the sport in 2019 and 2020 has settled into something close to a new normal. Carbon-plated, thick-soled racing shoes are now the standard across professional distance running, not the exception.

The controversy hasn’t fully disappeared, but the shoes that once nearly got banned are now simply what elite runners wear.

Does it matter to you whether a marathon record was set in shoes that give a measurable speed advantage, or is that advantage no different from any other equipment improvement sports have accepted over time?