Adidas wins over Nike
In December 2016, Nike did something no sportswear brand had ever dared to do openly, it announced to the world that it was going to break what many considered the last great frontier of human athletic achievement: the two-hour marathon barrier. The project had a name: Breaking2. And behind it was the full financial and scientific muscle of the world’s biggest sports brand.
It was audacious. The men’s world record at the time stood at 2:02:57, set by Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto in 2014. Shaving over three minutes off that time wasn’t just ambitious, experts questioned whether it was even biologically possible. Nike didn’t care. They assembled a team of engineers, biomechanists, nutritionists, physiologists and designers at their Beaverton, Oregon headquarters, and went to work.
At the centre of the project were three elite runners: Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge, the reigning Olympic marathon champion; Ethiopia’s Lelisa Desisa; and Eritrea’s Zersenay Tadese, the half-marathon world record holder. The venue chosen for the attempt was the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza, the Formula One circuit in Italy, selected for its flat surface, low altitude, and predictable weather. To give the runners every possible edge, 30 of the world’s best athletes were brought in as rotating pacemakers, arranged in a precise aerodynamic formation to cut wind resistance, while a pace car projected green lasers onto the track to guide the lead pacer’s exact position.
And then there was the shoe.
Nike had been engineering marathon-specific footwear since 2013 for this precise moment. What they unveiled for Breaking2 was the Vaporfly Elite, a shoe built around a carbon fiber plate embedded in ultra-light ZoomX foam, designed to return energy to the runner with every stride, essentially propelling them forward rather than simply cushioning their feet. According to Nike’s own research, the shoe improved running efficiency by up to 4.2%. It was unlike anything that had ever been strapped to a competitive runner’s foot.
On May 6, 2017, with 13.1 million people watching the livestream, making it Twitter’s biggest brand-driven live event at the time, Kipchoge ran 26.2 miles in 2 hours and 25 seconds. He had destroyed the existing world record. But he had not broken two hours. The barrier held by 25 agonizing seconds.
The attempt was not eligible for official world record status anyway, due to the rotating pacemakers and controlled conditions that did not meet the International Association of Athletics Federations’ requirements. Nike had proven the concept but hadn’t claimed the prize.
What they had done, however, was change distance running forever.
The Vaporfly went on sale to the public. Almost immediately, the sport’s record books began crumbling. Athletes wearing the shoe, or rival brands scrambling to copy its technology, started posting times that would have been unthinkable before 2017. Competitors complained it was mechanical doping. Some athletes competing for other brands reportedly raced in Vaporflys with the Nike swoosh blacked out. World Athletics was forced to convene a technical group to decide whether the shoes should be banned altogether. In early 2020, they settled on regulations: no more than one carbon fiber plate, a maximum sole height of 40mm, and the shoe had to be available for public purchase before being worn in competition.
Nike, meanwhile, wasn’t finished with the sub-two mission. In October 2019, Kipchoge lined up in Vienna for the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, another controlled, unsanctioned attempt, and this time, he did it. He crossed the line in 1:59:40, the first human being to run a marathon in under two hours. The world celebrated. But officially, it counted for nothing.
The barrier remained unbroken on the record books.
While all of this was unfolding, Adidas watched, and learned. Before the Vaporfly arrived, Adidas had owned the marathon shoe landscape. Their Adizero Adios had been the weapon of choice for the world’s fastest runners, including Kimetto when he set that 2014 world record. Then Nike rewrote the rules and Adidas found themselves playing catch-up, their share of major marathon podiums halving as the Vaporfly era took hold.
Their response was the Adizero Adios Pro, a carbon-plated answer to the Vaporfly, using carbon-infused rods designed to mirror the geometry of the human foot. It worked well enough. In September 2023, Adidas athlete Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia ran 2:11:53 at the Berlin Marathon in the Adios Pro Evo 1, shattering the women’s world record by over two minutes. But the men’s sub-two-hour barrier, the one Nike had dangled before the world in 2016, remained out of reach.
Then came April 26, 2026. London. And everything changed.
Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe and Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha stood on the start line of the 2026 TCS London Marathon wearing shoes that had gone on sale just two days earlier, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. Weighing just 97 grams, it was the lightest supershoe ever made, built on a completely overhauled carbon technology system Adidas called ENERGYRIM, replacing the carbon rods of previous models with a carbon-integrated fork running along the perimeter of the sole, designed to maximise the volume of Adidas’s new LightStrike Pro EVO foam while delivering precise energy return exactly where a runner needs it most. Three years of research, more than a dozen prototypes, and testing sessions in laboratories and high-altitude training camps in Kenya and Ethiopia had gone into building it.
Sawe pulled away from Kejelcha in the final moments of the race. He crossed the line in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds, the first human being in history to run a full 26.2-mile marathon under two hours in a sanctioned, world record-eligible race. Kejelcha, on his marathon debut, finished 11 seconds behind in 1:59:41. Both men, in Adidas. Assefa, also in Adidas, claimed the women’s world record the same morning with a time of 2:15:41.
“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. It reflects the hard work behind the scenes, the support of my team, and the role of innovation in helping me push beyond limits. I’m honored to be part of a new chapter for the sport,” Sawe said in a statement.
Patrick Nava, general manager at Adidas Running, framed it as a collective triumph. “This is a testament to the years of hard work and dedication they have made, alongside our innovation team, who have built a supershoe which breaks new ground in the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3,” he said.
Nike, the company that started all of this, responded on Instagram, a rare public acknowledgment of a rival’s achievement. “The clock has been reset. There is no finish line,” they wrote, tagging the post’s location in London and attaching a statement from Kipchoge himself, the man who had come closer than anyone to this moment and done it first, just never in a race that counted.
The irony of Sunday’s result is thick. Nike dreamed the dream, funded the science, built the shoe that forced the entire industry to evolve, and ran the race that proved it was possible. A decade later, on the sport’s grandest stage, it was Adidas who got to write the history books.
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