Adidas reclaims super shoe crown with first sub-two-hour marathon

Sports brand Adidas has reclaimed bragging rights in the battle of the super shoes, with athletes Sabastian Sawe and Tigst Assefa wearing its Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3s to run the London marathon in world record times.

Both athletes were wearing Adidas' latest super shoe as they ran world record times in the men's and women's races at the London Marathon at the weekend, with Sawe recording the first-ever official sub-two-hour time.

Sawe's time of one hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds marks the culmination of a long-running competition between Nike and Adidas to develop a shoe that enabled athletes to break the elusive barrier.

In the women-only race, Assefa also set a world record time of two hours, 15 minutes and 41 seconds.

In recent years, the marathon world record time has repeatedly been broken, with advances in trainer technology playing a significant role. Following the race, Sawe acknowledged "the role of innovation" in helping him achieve his time.

"To break the world record is something I have dreamed about for a long time, and to achieve it means so much to me and to the sport of running," he said.

"It reflects the hard work behind the scenes, the support of my team, and the role of innovation in helping me push beyond limits."

Set to be released later this week, the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is the third trainer in the range and according to Adidas improves athlete's "running economy" by 1.6 per cent.

"First of all, it's around 30 per cent lighter," Adidas GM Running Patrick Nava told Dezeen.

"But more importantly, it improves running economy by approximately 1.6 percent. At this level, that translates into minutes... which ultimately determines whether you're above or below the two-hour mark."

The trainer is an evolution of the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1, which was worn by Assefa when she broke the women-only marathon record in 2023, and also aims to combine super-shoe technology with lightness.

Described by Adidas as a "radical step forward", the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is the brand's "first ever sub-100-gram race shoe". For comparison, the Pro Evo 1 weighed 140 grams and was considered extremely light.

The shoe, which weighs 97 grams, has an extra-thick sole typical of super shoes, measuring 39 millimetres high at its heel.

According to Adidas, the construction of this sole was key to the trainer's success.

It was made from a newly created foam, named Lightstrike Pro Evo, which is 50 per cent lighter than previous versions developed by the brand. This makes it the "lightest and most responsive foam to date", Adidas said.

The lightweight foam was stabilised with carbon integrated into the sole in a newly developed system.

"Creating the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 pushed us to think differently from the very start. We weren't just trying to improve on what we'd done before, we wanted to see how far we could go," said the brand.

"We went through more than a dozen iterations, working closely with our athletes and testing everywhere from our labs in Herzogenaurach to high-altitude camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, he continued," Adidas added.

"At that level, every detail really matters – we were measuring things down to the nearest nanogram. It was a long process, but it's led to something we believe genuinely changes what a race-day shoe can feel like."

Sawe's time in the London marathon took the world record away from fellow Kenyan athlete Kelvin Kiptum, who won the Chicago Marathon in two hours and 35 seconds wearing Nike's Alphafly 3 trainers.

Dezeen recently created a timeline of the race to create the ultimate running super shoe.

Although the two-hour mark has now been broken Adidas, is already developing the next generation of its Pro Evo trainers, with the aim of cutting more time from the marathon world record.

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