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.

Download eliud kipchoge vo2max