Renato Canova wrote:
The problem is not if I'm paying by Nike or not. I don't make an endorsement for Nike with my post, but I speak about a TECHNICAL situation that was interpretated by Worldathletics in wrong way.
Here, the "challenge" is not between Nike and other Companies (that now follow Nike to produce special shoes for road races, using the limit of 40mm of thickness).
The challenge is between Racing Shoes without spikes (any of them) and Track Shoes with spikes (any of them). Nobody can say that running on track with Racing Shoes athletes can have some advantage against athletes running with spikes : this is a total idiocy.
The problem is that the organism creating this idiocy is the specific Working Group of Worldathletics, showing that the technical stream doesn't understand anything about how shoes work, and about the real biomechanics.
The big market, for any Company producing shoes, regards racing shoes. In that field, the Companies went in war against Nike Vaporfly, that after the exploit of Eliud Kipchoge increased the sales with amateurs and joggers. For those runners, there is a real advantage in their performances, in distances like 5 km or 10 km too.
But this is not the case of top runners. Vaporfly (or similar racing shoes produced by other Companies) don't give any advantage to the athletes if the speed is faster than 2'45" / 2'50" (depending on the individual biomechanics) under the side of SPEED, and this means that there are not advantages for athletes under 28' to use racing shoes on track, instead spikes.
The advantage is connected with another factor : more the race is long, more with this type of shoes athletes can "save" their legs, avoiding factors like hemolysis, and reducing the loss of elasticity in the elastic fibers due to the specific tireness of the legs. We can say that, more than advantages for the propulsion, the real advantage is in the shock absorption, and starts to act after 20-25 km, allowing athletes to run "negative splits" in the marathon when, before, this was an exception.
So, it's clear that to ban a shoe that makes top athletes SLOWER on track is not something logic, and can only create a lot of problems for road runners, who try. maybe twice in one season, to run on track. In US, and especially in Japan, more than 50% of the athletes running 10000m on track used racing shoes (not only Nike), officially illegal, and Worldathletics had to be aware of the problem, due to the previous illogic mistake. Now, the fact to allow athletes running on track with racing shoes validated for road races, but out of the "official" rule, considering the achieved results like "statistic validity" but not for official limits in case of Championships, can only create a new problem, and this because Worldathletics doesn't want to cancel the previous rule, trying to clutch at straws for justifying a clear mistake.
Everybody understands that the position : "what you do is illegal, but you are allowed to do" can't exist in the normal life.
The only solution is to cancel completely the rule, validating racing shoes for every athletic event (including sprint and jumps, if somebody wants to run slower or to jump shorter...).