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It is interesting that Nike got most of the press and coverage for these sorts of shoes for quite a while when they came out (see the sub-2 project with Kipchoge), but both sub-two marathons in London appear to have been run in Adidas shoes.
This seems to be at least somewhat true at the absolute peak of the field: the Ethiopians and Kenyans are quite dominant, but there are rather elite runners from other continents that get fairly close and win occasionally: Ryan Hall and Conner Mantz are not examples of slow, even if they weren't/aren't really dominant in the sport. American women have done somewhat better than the men, too (probably thanks to Title IX increasing women's athletic scholarships and development opportunities): Molly Seidel placed third in the Tokyo Olympics Marathon, and Des Linden won Boston in 2018 (the men's winner that year was Japanese!).
It's also at least interesting that trail and ultra running is not (currently) dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians, but that may be a function of smaller prize purses and career opportunities.
Is there any real money in Ultra at present? I've read Born to Run and try watch the yearly Barkley Marathon content but it strikes me that most of the runners are self-funded autist types. Doesn't appear that any of the Barkley finishers thusfar are of African descent
Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.
The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.
From looking, Comrades and UTMB both have total prize purses at least on the magnitude of B-tier marathons. But a couple big races in the whole sport doesn't justify whole training cycles and injury risk.
It's tempting to compare to gravel bike racing, though: at first it was a scrappy, self-driven sport where everyone nominally toed the same start lone, but it seems to be rapidly commercializing and a number of ex-ProTour riders have decided to retire there and keep riding at a high level.
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Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new? However, marketing can only get you so far and Nike should be worried overall about losing such a large part of the running market, there's a reason the stock price is in the dumpster. Arguably, however, this isn't really a technology problem so much as an execution problem; Nike's loss in market share isn't really because rivals invented something Nike didn't, but rather Nike's shoes haven't had the right mix of quality control, durability, and comfort that hobby-runners and semi-pros want.
These technical sneaker competitions are cool but it strikes me as car brands building cars to win at Formula 1.
Am I a serious enough runner that I buy multiple pieces of gear? Yes. Am I fast? No. Will $500 sneakers make me fast? Also no. Am I most of the people buying shoes? Not even. Most are even more casual.
I suppose Nike started this fight. And unlike F1 I can buy the sneakers that the champions roll in and say "why yes these do feel incredibly light", so that's something.
I'd really kill for a pair of running sneakers that prevented blisters though.
I think the athletes are doing most of the work - the guys running 2-hour marathons with supershoes were running sub-2:15 marathons without them.
Also these are $500 trainers - i.e. well within the budget of a middle-class American, an upper-middle-class Europoor, or a DIII college athletics programme - not $15 million F1 cars.
Are they buying them though? Even $150 running shoes already feel pretty luxe. I'll check to see if anyone in my run club has a pair of the elite tier ones.
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Breaking it in an actual race gets you recognition from e.g. the Guiness Book of Records, which is what the man in the street takes as official. You can argue about how much the difference between an exhibition race run under competition rules (like the "race" Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile in) and an event with a team of 41 pacers running in a formation designed to protect the record breaker from air resistance, but from the point of view of achieving the thing we set out to achieve when people started talking about the two-hour marathon, the point is that one counts and the other doesn't.
Also, the 2026 London Marathon was a real race with big money on the line. It wasn't the pacer in from of him that pulled Sawe over the line, it was the risk of being overtaken by Kejelcha that pushed him.
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