It’s shoe time: the trainers and tracks driving recent run of world records

At New Balance’s sports research lab in Boston, there is a humanoid robot that actually sweats and breathes. Andi is his name and the more the temperature and humidity in his environmental chamber goes up, the more his heat sensors twitch and the 150 pores on his body become moist. It amounts to $500,000 worth of kit, and the idea is it will make sportswear that evaporates sweat and cools the body faster without putting humans at risk. Yet, incredibly, Andi isn’t even the most cutting edge piece of tech in the building.

Next door is the slam lab, where the special foam and carbon plate in New Balance’s world record-breaking super spike, the FuelCell MD-X v3, has been formulated, pounded, given life. A few metres away is a running lane with force plates and motion cameras, which not only captures an athlete’s skeleton digitally in real time, but the forces going through their bodies when they test the spikes.

Millions of pounds of research, development and expertise will come to a head over 50 dizzying seconds in Paris next Thursday – when two of the company’s biggest stars, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Femke Bol, will slug it out for the Olympic 400m hurdles gold medal. If the world record went it would come as no surprise, given that 17 of them have been set this year by athletes wearing Nike, Adidas, Puma and New Balance shoes and spikes.

For all these brands, these Games are a battle within a battle, a race within a race. They know a gold medal can send a subliminal message the next time someone buys a pair of trainers: these can make you better too.

But at the highest level, this is a game of fine margins and huge stakes. Britain’s 1500m world champion, Josh Kerr, says he puts in “hours and hours” with engineers and designers at his sponsors, Brooks, because he knows how vital it is. “It’s going to make or break our career, so having a hand in that is important,” he says.

But when it comes to super spikes, where does the hype stop and the reality kick on? The Guardian has spoken to scientifics, athletes and leading figures in brands to find out.

The first thing is spikes are faster. The record books tell us that. But a new study by a team of scientists led by Wouter Hoogkamer at the University of Massachusetts, also provides further evidence.

Hoogkamer’s team asked athletes to perform a series of 200m runs at self-perceived race pace in older versions of Nike, Puma and Adidas superspikes and a basic spike.

The results were fascinating. They found “participants ran significantly faster in two superspikes compared to traditional spikes (2.1% and 1.6%)” and that these “speed results were mirrored by changes in step length, as participants took significantly longer steps in the two faster spike models (2.3% and 1.9%).

Hoogkamer also put the original Nike Vaporfly shoe, which came out in 2017, to scientific scrutiny. For years afterwards he says athletes would secretly ask him to test their running economy in different brands before they signed a new shoe contract. That, he says, happens less now.

However, anecdotal stories remain of athletes who respond crazily well to super spikes and therefore run much faster. Hoogkamer agrees that it could affect some podiums in Paris. “There’s definitely a chance that some of these results are going to be influenced,” he says.

The second thing most experts agree on is that Nike has lost its lead over the competition. In 2019, the company’s athletes took 31 of the 36 podium places in the six major marathons, and their spike had the jump at the 2019 world championships and 2021 Olympics. In fact, Kerr was allowed to wear an unmarked pair of Nike spikes by Brooks when he won bronze in Tokyo.

“Most of the brands have a competitive spike now,” says Geoff Burns, a biomechanics expert and sport physiologist at the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. “Whereas when Tokyo rolled around in 2021 I would have bet dollars to doughnuts that almost every athlete from 800m to 10,000m would have chosen the Nike Dragonfly or the Victory if they could.”

The gap between brands has narrowed on the road, too. Burns has published research that shows Nike’s Vaporfly and Asics Metaspeed Sky produced similar results. He also cites a study that showed the Vaporfly and the Adidas Adizero Pro 3 performed almost identically.

However, intriguingly, he suggests that Nike’s newest marathon shoe, the AlphaFly 3 has not performed as well in testing as its AlphaFly 1 from 2019. And he says the early evidence is that Adidas’s $500 Pro Evo 1, which is the lightest marathon shoe on the market, is not significantly better than its Pro 3 – despite the hefty price tag.

Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty more scope for innovation. Materials can be made lighter. Foams softened or hardened. The position of the plate tweaked. And new materials found.

Puma’s vice-president of innovation, Romain Girard, points to the company’s new superfoam, which is made from aliphatic TPU and not Pebax like most other brands.

“We tested 600 materials over two years,” he says. “So our next generation of Nitro Elite spikes have a completely new recipe that no one else has on the market.” Puma’s athletes appear to find it tasty. The pole vaulter Armand Duplantis and high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh recently set world records, and Britain’s Matt Hudson-Smith shattered the European 400m record in July.

Nike, meanwhile, has adopted a different approach with its new Zoom Victory 2. The spike, which Faith Kipyegon wore to break the 1500m world record in Paris last year and Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson crushed her own British 800m record recently in London, gets its speed from two air zoom units in the forefront which provide propulsion and stability.

There is another thing everyone agrees on: it’s not just the shoes. As Trevor Painter, Hodgkinson’s coach says, the new superfast Mondo tracks are helping too. “There’s a lot of ingenuity going into the way the tracks are laid because it helps you,” he says. “On some tracks you wouldn’t go anywhere near as quick if you went in the wrong direction, because it’s set up to propel you. Everything is designed to help the athletes run faster.”

A third factor in the faster times on the track comes down to nutrition. Last year the Swedish company Maurten released its bicarb system which allows athletes to ingest sodium bicarbonate, believed to be beneficial during strenuous exercise, without having to take multiple trips to the toilet.

“The superspikes have a larger benefit,” says Burns. “But when you add in the bicarb it makes a lot of sense why you’ve seen another continued step forward in times over the last 18 months.”

But the crazy thing is that this revolution, at least on the track, is only just starting. “We have seen some Nike prototypes of what’s coming up soon and they’re like something from Back to the Future,” says Painter. “They are a bit weird, but they’ll probably set the word alight when they come out.”

The other brands, however, insist they have their own surprises prepared. “The pace of innovation is as fierce as it has ever been,” says Kevin Fitzpatrick, the New Balance global vice-president running. “But 2025 will see us take another huge step forward.” And you know that Puma, Adidas, Asics and the rest will be just as ready.