Every Reason to Hate on the Nike Alphafly, Ranked – runnersworld.com

Here at Runner’s World, our test team obsesses over the latest technology in running, so naturally we’re going to cover the opening salvos of The Shoe Wars. You like the shoes you run in for your own reasons and so do we, so unless your name is Abebe Bikila, you must admit that we all benefit from improvements in shoe technology.

That said, the significant advantage provided by Nike’s Vaporfly and Alphafly is fundamentally altering the way we talk about our sport. Yesterday, Nike announced its new Air Zoom Alphafly Next% shoe that it says will be permissible under new World Athletics rules to be used in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, news that lit the running world ablaze with steaming hot takes on both sides of the issue.

There are good reasons to hate this shoe, praise it, or not know how to feel about it. World Athletics’s decision to allow the shoes may have positive and negative implications, so I open-sourced this guide from my own observations and from the opinions of prominent figures around the running world to attempt to make sense of the frustration surrounding these shoes.

I’ve given each anti-Alphafly point a Hater Score on a 1-5 scale (5 being highly valid, 1 being hogwash) based on my opinion of its long term validity for the sport. These views are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of every Runner’s World editor. Please direct your hate mail squarely at me.

It’s Ugly

Hater Score: 5

It looks like a Vaporfly mated with a Tide Pod.

It’s Too Expensive for Every Runner to Afford

Hater Score: 5

To be clear: By “Every Runner,” I mean runners who actually earn a paycheck in the sport. I don’t really care that these shoes put a massive dent in your wallet or mine. We’re all hobby joggers, those of us who don’t run for our bread. You don’t need these shoes to beat your enemies at your local 5K. You just want them. There are plenty of ways you can drop more dough in running—coaching, race entries, travel, sports massage, physical therapy, electronics—so let’s not act like one pair of shoes is ruining the financial parity of our sport. At the recreational level, it’s already haves and have-nots.

However, let’s say the Alphafly confers an even greater advantage than the Vaporfly—a 7 percent reduction in running economy, for the sake of this example. If lack of access to an expensive shoe means the difference between a young runner getting discovered and earning their first pro contract or not, then that’s no good for the sport. High-tech shoes will only get more expensive, which bodes poorly for the upward mobility of economically disadvantaged, talented runners who might otherwise become the next Kipchoge or Linden.

Your Favorite Athletes Won’t Be Wearing It in Tokyo

Hater Score: 3.5

A lot of the Alphafly debate has to do with far-reaching consequences that will extend past the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the shoe will likely offer an advantage to Nike-sponsored runners at the Games. This is based on the assumption that it’s better than the Vaporfly, the only shoe for which we have an actual figure on running economy improvement. And if it’s similar to the prototype Kipchoge wore to break two hours in the marathon, it’ll be very quick. However, as sport scientist and Adidas advisor Ross Tucker points out, not everyone will see the same advantage.

Most athletes aren’t openly complaining about the evident advantage of the Alphafly compared to their sponsors’ shoes. But then, you don’t bite the hand that feeds.

The running coach and former Nike employee Steve Magness expressed concern over the Alphafly’s effect on the upcoming Games, and I don’t think he’s wrong.

Similarly, Hoka One One athlete Stephanie Bruce said in a tweet that she’s confident in her sponsor’s shoes, but that The Shoe Wars are ruining the integrity of the sport.

Either way, I empathize with athletes who spent the past 3.5 years training for these Games, only for their competitors to get an apparent leg-up just before the trials. However, their sponsors have had just as much time to come up with a competing shoe. We don’t know how quick the Brooks Hyperion Elite, the Saucony Endorphin Pro, and the unnamed Adidas prototype will be, but such brands should have chipped away at Nike’s competitive advantage earlier in the runup to the 2020 Trials.

If Nike athletes dominate the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, the “Nike is evil” conspiracy will only grow stronger. I mean, it’s not like anybody can break a world record without the help of Vaporflys nowadays, right?

It Makes Running About More Than Human Competition

Hater Score: 2

Time to open a silo full of worms. Since a lot of people agree with him, let’s start with Ross Tucker’s argument.

His point, which Tucker dubbed “Ross’ rule,” goes like this. “When the difference made by technology is larger than the normal difference between athletes, then the integrity of the result is changed.” He expands upon it to say that the future of athletics entails athletes who are not necessarily better than one another, but those who are more responsive to the advantage provided by high-tech shoes. This references data from a BYU study that showed that some runners don’t see a significant advantage from the Vaporfly, while others may see an advantage above 4 percent.

Tucker isn’t wrong, but I contend that he’s operating on the premise that athletics was previously fair, which it wasn’t. We weren’t all born with the same genes. We don’t all respond to training in the same ways. Some runners have immense talent but lack the durability to survive hard training. And of course, some runners take drugs. If sport were fair, it wouldn’t be as compelling.

Technology could make running better. Our current situation, debating who gets to wear what shoe, exists because shoe companies are the primary sponsors for athletes. If you want to run professionally, you have to align yourself with Nike or a Nike competitor. So credit University of Michigan biomechanist Geoff Burns for the following idea.

The stance of the people who control running right now is that it isn’t interesting enough. We’re slashing entire events from Diamond League programs in an effort to attract new viewers and grow the sport. Meanwhile, 779,000 people live-streamed Eliud Kipchoge’s 1:59 marathon, an event in which highly controlled factors like the shoes, venue, and aerodynamics played crucial roles in Kipchoge’s success. Find me a parallel for that anywhere else in running.

Meanwhile, the Vaporfly/Alphafly controversy has attracted interest from people who didn’t previously care about running. The intersection between human performance and technology draws excitement we desperately need. We could all sulk about times changing and purity disappearing from the sport, or we could embrace the change and welcome outside money and sponsorship. Then runners could get paid a livable wage to wear whatever they want, and the technology becomes a personal choice on race day—just like fueling, hydration, and apparel—rather than a restriction.

Nike Played World Athletics Perfectly

Hater Score: 2

If you think it’s convenient that Nike had a 39.5mm-thick shoe ready to go a week after World Athletics set the 40mm stack height ceiling, you’re right. That is convenient.

Maybe Nike cut World Athletics a check to get the new rules ahead of time. But you have to ask yourself what’s more probable: A grand conspiracy between Nike and World Athletics, or a $30 billion shoe company having a bunch of contingency plans for whatever a sport’s governing body decided to do.

I don’t buy the conspiracy angle. It seems more likely that World Athletics, in establishing the 40mm, single carbon plate rules, wanted to wash its hands of the shoe debate and move on. It would help dispel rumors if World Athletics had justified the 40mm decision with any logic, but it didn’t. My theory is that Nike put out the über-thick Alphafly prototype for the Ineos 1:59 Challenge to establish what definitely wasn’t acceptable and hoped World Athletics would meet it somewhere between that and the Vaporfly Next%.

You can effectively set the rules when you’re the only one pushing them. As University of Colorado physiology professor Rodger Kram pointed out, Nike filed a patent for a midsole that looks just like the race-legal Alphafly in August 2018.

Thinner Vaporfly-esque shoes have also been spotted in the wild, indicating that Nike would’ve been fine at a 30mm stack height ruling, too.

If Nike has shown us anything over the past four years, it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate what its engineers can do. Whatever the decision, Nike was always going to be ready with a shoe that pushed the boundaries and complied, just barely, with the new rules. You can be upset that a well-heeled company outmaneuvered everyone else, but like New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, they won by playing against the rule book.

It Works

Hater score: 1

This is flagrant player-hating and I won’t stand for it. If a bear ransacks your campsite in the middle of the night because you didn’t tie up tomorrow’s sandwiches in a tree, you don’t get mad at the bear for doing bear stuff. You get mad at whoever was responsible for preventing the bear from acting in accordance with its own ethics.

The same logic should be applied to Nike. Adidas tried to do the same with the Adios Boost and set a world record in the process, but the company didn’t create a shoe that made their runners faster by such a large margin. In both cases, a group of engineers was given a challenge and presumably a metric ton of cash for research and development. Nike shouldn’t be demonized for doing it better.

Test Editor A former Division 1 runner, Dan grew up riding fixies and mountain bikes and now reviews everything from performance running shoes to road and cross bikes, to the latest tech for runners and cyclists at Bicycling and Runner’s World.