Opción B - 4 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Extraordinaria (Fase Mejora de Nota) 2023

OPTION B

SPORTS EQUIPMENT

Platform shoes are back in fashion, at least in athletics. Many of the long-distance runners at the Tokyo Olympics arrived at the starting line sporting footwear with a distinctive thick-looking heel. The new shoes offer such a big performance advantage that critics have described them as “technological doping.”

Running-shoe makers have long tried to improve athletic performance, observes Geoff Burns, a biomechanics expert at the University of Michigan. In 2016 Nike released the first version of its “Vaporfly” model, which improved running economy by 4%.

If that percentage were to translate directly into performance, it would reduce an elite male’s marathon time by five minutes. In practice, as Dr Burns observes, it wouldn’t quite do that. A marathon improvement of around 90 seconds would be a more realistic expectation. But Vaporfly and its successors have helped athletes smash a series of records. In 2019 Eliod Kipchoge, a Kenyan, became the first to run a marathon’s distance of 42.195km in under two hours.

Scientists are still not sure how the shoes work. The soles are made of a new type of foam that offers an unprecedented mix of strength and softness, according to Dr Burns. This returns around 80% of the energy from each strike of a runner’s foot. The carbon-fibre plate may help by strengthening the midsole, and possibly by altering a runner’s step. By protecting a runner’s bones, muscles and ligaments from repetitive impacts, the shoes may even help athletes train harder than they otherwise could.

All that is great news for Nike, which sells the Vaporfly and its successors for around $250 each. Whether it is good for the sport is another question. In January 2020 World Athletics, the governing body of international athletics, passed new rules limiting the thickness of a road shoe’s sole to 40mm. Meanwhile, Nike postponed plans to distribute high tech shoes designed for sprinters at the Tokyo games, possibly because they did not follow regulations either. But if they have worked out a way around that problem, there could be fireworks. (Fragment adapted from The Economist.)

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