Reports: Vaporfly to be banned

theJeff wrote:

Hardloper wrote:

Slippery slope fallacy

You are too intelligent to believe that the Slippery Slope doesn't exist.

The slippery slope is a metaphor that is sometimes perfectly valid:

Hoka One One Napali (discontinued) wrote:

It seems they are trying to ban both carbon fiber plates and thick soles shoes.

This brings up some new questions, like

- How can you tell if a shoe has a carbon fiber plate in it?

- If carbon fiber is banned, can other materials be used to make a similar plate?

- What happens to records/course records set in vaporflys, other carbon plate shoes, or just plain hoka cliftons/bondis?

- What does this mean for mid or back of the packers who aren’t going to podium or set records? Can they wear vaporflys?

- What does this mean for trail running?

- Will lug depth on trail running shoes count as part of the midsole thickness?

My ankles are sprained just at the mention of wearing Vaporflys for cross country trail running.

This would be awful for our sport. Snuffing out technology has never produced positive outcomes. Just look at how baseball is dying because they don't embrace technology.

dsk wrote:

This would be awful for our sport. Snuffing out technology has never produced positive outcomes. Just look at how baseball is dying because they don't embrace technology.

And look how baseball would be if they used alloy bats. HR every time.

the performance determinate between 2 equally talented runners shouldn't be determined by which one is willing to spend $350 on shoes

remember when Oscar Pistorius was trying to compete in the Olympics because the advantage the blades gave him

Maybe there could be two world records for a while like there are two for women - one with male pacer, one without men.

The fact that they even mention a possibility of Usain Bolt’s 9.58 being broken by Vaporfly spikes is enough of a reason to not take this article seriously. No [inferior] athlete with a Vaporfly spike (or any spike at all for that matter) will come close to 9.58 anyways.

Side note: I have Nike zoom fly 3’s, which also have a carbon plate in them. A little weird that only the Vaporfly is being banned, even though it’s not the only bike shoe with a carbon plate/foam sole. Are the zoom fly’s not proven to give the same advantage? I bought them because they were significantly cheaper than the Vaporfly, but they still felt fast running in them.

A light-enough 100 foot stack height would let EK take enormous strides.

https://cdn.digg.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/15100051/Screen-Shot-2019-10-15-at-9.58.52-AM.jpg

dsk wrote:

This would be awful for our sport. Snuffing out technology has never produced positive outcomes. Just look at how baseball is dying because they don't embrace technology.

Major League baseball has had record growth for 17 consecutive years. Check your facts before spouting.

KawauchiFTW wrote:

Not happening and if it is, anytime soon, it'll be only at the ELITE level only, or in very limited scope... No sane race director of mass start marathons would even think of checking and banning Vaporflys... Can you imagine Boston marathon checking for the VFs at the starting line??? Everybody would just laugh them off... BTW, Boston doesn't even care about all the downhill qualifiers and some of you are already "hoping" they will want to ban runners wearing VFs in all the BQ qualifiers... Seriously???

Like I said, in the worse case, it'll be only at the elite level, with all the runners competing for prize money... Don't worry hobby joggers, you are still going to have fun in your VFs;)

I could see it happen for Elite levels...

Take a look at cycling (road). They have very specific rules on what the frame should be and minimum weights for ICU events.

there are other manufactured bikes that a regular person can buy that are lighter that would be illegal to race in.

Part of me thinks this prevents some great designs...like the Banned Lotus bike but even within the regulations, there are still improvements each year to bikes.

There's one thing your forgetting in your argument. A lot of athletes are happy to get a contract from a sponsor that will pay them. Maybe Nike didn't offer these people a contract (aka an opportunity) to run in these shoes. Maybe another competitor brand is paying them MORE. Those athletes will OBVIOUSLY go to a company that pays them or pays them MORE. So you can't go faulting ANYONE here. As a post collegiate without a contract to any shoe company and still running. This crap is hard. I have to pay my own way to keep running.

Hello, it's obvious to me why they consider banning those shoes: to make their poster girl - whitey Paula - keep the world record, whereas Paula's blood misconduct was not denounced back in 2003.

Nope. It's the Takumi Sen 5 that Rhonex ran in

We are even seeing these used at the high school level. Outside of the technology I would say that these $250 shoes are totally out of reach for 90% of T&F families. Is this ok? Is $250 at the high school level an ethical access issue?

ShakingMyHead wrote:

dsk wrote:

This would be awful for our sport. Snuffing out technology has never produced positive outcomes. Just look at how baseball is dying because they don't embrace technology.

Major League baseball has had record growth for 17 consecutive years. Check your facts before spouting.

In baseball and golf, the rules have been fine-tuned in order to accommodate the facilities. Every hit shouldn't be a home run, though the new balls are an indication that the league wanted more HRs than it was getting. In golf, without restrictions, many championship courses would be obsolete because the pros would just be able to outhit the hazards that are supposed to be part of the game.

Running doesn't really have this problem. Despite the hyperbole some people have been throwing around, running a marathon 60 seconds faster doesn't mean you've "broken" the marathon. But If teams were regularly scoring 7 HRs per baseball game, that would fundamentally change the sport.

runforcupcakes wrote:

We are even seeing these used at the high school level. Outside of the technology I would say that these $250 shoes are totally out of reach for 90% of T&F families. Is this ok? Is $250 at the high school level an ethical access issue?

I see no issues here, for a few reasons.

First, high schoolers run XC and track, and the VF isn't really in its element in either sport. I doubt the VF provides a huge advantage in the 3200 vs. a runner in spikes, especially on a fast track. Some advantage, sure, but not as big as on the roads.

Second, the advantage that the VF gives you, even by optimistic projections, is pretty small. It's a big deal if it takes your marathon from 2:05 to 2:03:30, but if you scale that out to a 5k, we're not talking so much time that VFs would suddenly be mandatory if you want to be competitive. (As an aside, short slalom skis debuted when I was a high school ski racer. Anyone on old-school skis was instantly non competitive. They even started setting courses for the new skis. That pretty much required an outlay of $900 for the new Rossignol 9s. Yeah, it's an expensive sport to begin with, but that was a tough pill to swallow for people who had been successfully on the podium using their older siblings hand me down skis.)

Third, the expense is pretty small in the scheme of things. Even if you buy your kid the VFs, you're still probably spending less on his running than parents are in just about any other sport. And of course, many families will not pay $250 for shoes, but that's not a new reality. There are plenty of kids running high school track who don't have spikes either.

At the end of the day, if some rich kids are able to run 18:30 instead of 18:40 because their parents were able to shell out $250 for some shoes, I don't think that's a major crisis for the sport.

If some kind of ban does come into effect, it will be interesting to see what other brands’ carbon plate shoes will be affected.

As far as I could find, the Hoka CX has a stack height of 32 mm. The Sketchers GoRun Speed Elite and Saucony Endorphin Pro, expected to be released in February and June, respectively, look like they have lower stack heights as well, along with the new Adidas Adizero Pro, although it’s unclear when/if that shoe will be released to the public.

It would be funny if World Athletics kills off the Vaporfly but leaves the knock-offs. Would all the unsponsored elites/sub-elites suddenly start switching to another brand’s carbon shoe?

At the same time, can we finally come to an agreement on what ml of EPO microdosing should be allowed, since if we allow everyone to do it then we'd have fewer cheaters?

Good news for all of LRC’s pogo shoe wearers, per the Guardian, despite the other headlines, the VF 4% and Next% are “unlikely” to be banned, rather, they are targeting the AlphaFly.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/sport/2020/jan/15/nike-shoes-revolutionised-marathon-times-unlikely-banned-eliud-kipchoge

Boing boing!