This is Ground Control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today
— Space Oddity, David Bowie.
The Space Oddity lyric can correlate twice in metaphor: flying and whose shirt shoes are you wear? As hot as that song was on the charts in 1969, road racing shoes are a hot topic now, perhaps equally so.
So, who was wearing which shoe, and where?
It turns out that both winners at the Chicago Marathon were wearing the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, but there is an overall mix from finisher to finisher wearing a Nike AlfaFly or Adidas Adizero shoe. The shoe brands Nike and Adidas were even neck and neck between a few races — see below — until we dig into the Berlin Marathon podium. All the same shoe for the six podium finishers.
The only shoe brands to infiltrate the podiums in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Chicago not named Nike or Adidas were the Under Armour Velocity Elite 3 by Kenyan Sharon Lokedi, who finished second in Chicago. Also, the Asics brand Metaspeed in Boston — how about that?
