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The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 racing shoe is good for one race and one race only and that’s it. Good luck getting your feet into a pair. Collectors will seek them, keep them in a box and never, ever wear them. They are currently priced at $655 CAD, £400 sterling, and $500 USD. Market value may be higher years down the road. Although all eyes were on the women’s Berlin Marathon champion Tigst Assefa, who wore them, not every athlete ran a personal best wearing that shoe.
The shoe weighs just 138 grams and it comes with a new foam design that ensures it remains optimized for a race despite its weight. We are not sure what that means.
It has a 39-millimetre heel and it has a first-of-its-kind rocker at the front of the shoe which propels the athlete forward at a greater speed and in a way that allows them to expend less energy.
Ethiopian Tigst Assefa (sometimes written as Tigist) smashed the world record by over two minutes. The old record was by Kenyan Brigid Kosgei at 2:14:04 from Chicago 2019. Assefa ran 2:11:53 on Sunday. One now may wonder how fast men’s winner Eliud Kipchoge would have run if he too wore them. Instead, Kipchoge wore the third edition of the Nike AlphaFly. He finished in 2:02:42 for his fifth Berlin win and his fourth-fastest time. Second-place finisher Vincent Kipkemoi who finished in the personal best time of 2:03:13 wore the Asics Metaspeed Sky+. Finishing in third place was Ethiopian Tadese Takele in a new personal best of 2:03:23 wearing the adidas Adizero Adios Pro 3. The two latter athletes are aged 24 and 21, respectively.
The second and third-place women Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya and Magdalena Shauri of Tanzania wore the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 and Anta C202 5 GT Pro, respectively. They finished in the times of 2:17:49 and 2:18:41.
Shauri, the now 27-year-old, in her only previous marathon, clocked a 2:33:28 in Hamburg in 2017. She apparently did not run a marathon for six years. She did, however, run a 1:06:37 half marathon in 2020 — it’s the national record. The story is similar to Assefa’s, who ran two marathons, 2:34:32, then 2:15:37, then 2:11:53. Assefa disappeared during the pandemic to emerge as one of the fastest marathon runners in history. Her 2:15:37 2022 Berlin performance was a head-turner. The 2:11:53 has put the running world in a tizzy.
Interestingly, Chepkirui did not run a personal best wearing the same adidas foot rockets as Assefa. Her best is from Valencia nine months ago where she ran 20 seconds faster in a pair of adidas Adios Pro 3.
