Earlier this year,
The Times reported that the sport of athletics rejected the shoe that sportswear giant Nike claimed was “a new paradigm of performance on the track”. The Nike Viperfly is a shoe designed specifically for 100m sprinters, a “super shoe” that promises to do to sprinting what road shoes have done to the marathon over the past five years.
It was reported that the shoe was rejected after manufacturers raised objections and fears that the shoe would be so effective that it would help inferior sprinters erase Usain Bolt’s name from the record books. (Bolt holds the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m relay world records, and a host of Olympic and Diamond League records too.)