The second week of the Paris Olympics will be all about athletics. Over the coming days, more than a thousand athletes will go toe to toe in the hope of being crowned the fastest runner over distances that range from 100 metres to the marathon. But there’s a problem: thanks to so-called “super shoes”, we may not know if the person who crosses the line first really is the fastest runner in the truest sense of the word.
The build-up to every modern Olympic Games is peppered with stories about athletics tracks and swimming pools painstakingly designed for setting records (though the pool used in Paris this year is unusually slow). But any performance boosts these give are shared by all competitors.
Then came the arrival of the first super shoes in 2016, which accelerated road-running events like the marathon. The launch of their track-optimised “super spikes” cousin a few years later is now having a similar effect on the longest races run inside the stadium.