Nike’s Vivid Shoes, and the Gray Area of Performance Enhancement
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Other than devices that add energy from a stored reserve, like hidden motors in bicycles, I have a really hard time drawing a line of "cheating". Why were shark suits banned? [1] Why is blood doping to allow for quicker recovery "bad", but a finely calculated nutrition regimen to allow for quicker recovery de rigueur? Why are these fancy new shoes so egregious, when compared to races run 50 years ago, the current shoes are futuristic and unobtainable.
Excepting the most basic sports (running), every other sport is reliant on technology. So there's no way around advancement.
And I'm in favor of it! I want to see more awesome suits that blast world records out of the literal water. I want to see someone top 2:00:00 in a marathon. I want crazy new F1 cars with ideas no one's had before. Let's do it. That's more "human achievement" than some guy running really fast.
[1] "Because Michael Phelps complained." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/25/why-ban-ful...
You can't sell a swim suit that breaks down after a few uses. You can't sell people on autologous blood transfusions. If it was about technology bike racers would all be using recumbent bikes, but that is not very popular with consumers.
It's a very finely tuned balance; enough advancement so you can keep selling new stuff, not enough to make it predominantly an absurd R&D game and obscure the human talent.
so many people think 4'+ Biles can jump 10 feet in the air. even the arena's have huge changes in tech
However, I'm not convinced by the argument that sports need to keep equipment palatable to amateurs. Consider Formula 1 racing: it's a popular spectator sport, despite the fact that an F1 car costs millions of dollars, which surely no regular Joe can afford.
I'm pretty sure that you will be able to sell people on gene therapy that provides enhancement pretty soon.
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tlinden/winforb.html
There is no mention of bike manufacturers involved at all. Do you have a citation for your claim?
Some athletes who garner millions in endorsements or part of highly developed countries that prioritize athletic programs can afford or have access to elite trainers, coaches, doctors, sport scientists, nutritionists/dietitians, and legal supplements that will provide them advantages over more amateur athletes.
Taken to the furthest extreme, everybody who can run successfully in these races can afford proper nutrition, airfare, clothing, and entry fees. There are plenty of people in the world who can't afford those things - should we disqualify everything in the name of "fairness"?
And the insane, nearly lifelong training.
In what sense are you using the word democratic? In terms of low barriers to entry, or something else?
To take your statement at face value, running is decidedly not democratic, as the sport is dominated by 2 east African countries with a negligibly small proportion of the world's population.
For a truly democratic sport, at least 1/7 of the champions/finishers would have to be Chinese and another 1/7 Indian, as those are the two most populous countries in the world.
Personally, I draw the line at what's readily available to all competitors without requiring them to compromise their health. So, I have no problem with runners taking moderate doses of caffeine before races - anyone can afford a cup of coffee - and I don't have an issue with shoes that are expensive but within the range prices of high-end running shoes, but I do have a problem with steroids and blood doping.
Thing is strength sports have this already and no one who doesn't themselves compete is really beating down the doors to watch them. Powerlifting is divided into drug tested and untested, but is there a meaningful difference to the casual Sports Center viewer seeing a clip of a dude squatting 477.5kg drug tested in knee sleeves vs 485kg untested in knee wraps? MMA has grown in popularity as the UFC has gotten really serious about in- and out-of-competition testing. A coworker joked that he wanted to see cage fighting with an "anything goes" drug policy but we already had that a few years ago and he was watching the same amount of it then as now: 0. The NFL for all intents and purposes has no drug testing and it basically owns a whole day of the week for 40% of the year in the U.S., but if it ever gets serious about testing I don't think that would really detract from the spectacle of it all.
Point is: I used to think this too but I don't actually see much of value prop in doing this.
My own experience, as well as anecdotes from a lot of runners that I know, all confirm that running is very hard on the knees. Whenever I've had knee issues, the exercise that I have to cut out in order to make them go away is always running.
Or are you objecting to the "on pavement" bit? I don't really know whether that matters, I live in a city so all of my running is on pavement.
[1] Eliza Chakravarty et al. "Long distance running and knee osteoarthritis: A prospective study," American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2008, 35(2), 133-138
[2] David Felson et al., "Effects of recreational physical activities on the development of knee osteoarthritis in older adults of different weights: The Framingham Study," Arthritis & Rheumatism, 2007, 57(1), 6-12
The question of pavement vs soft surfaces is AFAIK open from an injury standpoint. Many people would expect that soft surfaces lower injury rates but I don't think we have evidence to support that.
There's also a difference, which may play a role, between short-term knee problems like runner's knee and underlying damage like osteoarthritis.
What follows is just my opinion/interpretation, but might be helpful. Knees in running are a bit like bearings in a car wheel. They don't generally go bad on their own (unless they are overloaded when not ready), but instead because of imbalanced forces around them, like mis-aligned wheels or tire tread wear. The knee has a lot of outside forces acting on it, mainly from the quadriceps and the IT bands, and if these forces aren't in harmony, they will pull on the knee and affect the way it tracks/moves. Since the knee has to move thousands of times over the course of a single run, a small imbalance can add up and cause injury. So a lot of times the fix lies in stretching or strengthening the quads and IT bands (e.g. I find sometimes that a knot in my quads can cause knee problems in running that go away soon once the knot is worked out).
NFL and Boxing are sports where brain injuries occur when doing the sport by the rules. I - and many others - think that is unacceptable, and in the NFL at least there seems to be at least a small amount of movement to improvement to this.
or wearing out your knees from running on pavement for hundreds of miles.
There's plenty of evidence showing this isn't really a thing. Humans evolved to run long distances and while modern high level sport is generally at a higher intensity this doesn't seem to cause "wearing out of knees".
OTOH, many "runners" (even healthy ones) are much much heavier than the weights we evolved at, and there does seem to be a link there.
Blood doping is exceptionally safe- like aspirin level safe.
What if there was a shoe insert that could fracture and destroy your foot? That would probably be less safe than blood doping.
Plus, professional athletes already compromise their health. From TBI in football (both kinds) to knee damage in professional runners, you have to admit there is a ton of grey area- and I believe most professional athletes already damage their body more through the 'unadulterated' pursuit of their sport than a regular one of us would through blood doping.
In 2015, Hardline Curling launched a radical new design of curling broom called the icePad. Their broom can alter ice with tremendous efficiency, allowing players to make previously impossible shots. Many players described the icePad broom as "like having a remote control for the stone".
Leading teams voluntarily agreed to a temporary moratorium on the new style of broom. Following an international summit on the issue, the decision was made to standardise on a single type of traditional broom fabric. The consensus was that the new broom technology had fundamentally changed the nature of the sport for the worse, diminishing the importance of skill and athleticism.
http://www.tsn.ca/inside-curling-s-broom-controversy-1.38105... http://www.worldcurling.org/ss2016-update
1: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_...
You don't see it as perverting some of the basic tenets of sport and competition to encourage rampant technical meddling in them? You honestly don't see where that road leads?
But then again, for me, normal sport is boring.
Finally, if we look at what happend back in the days when there where a lot less rules on race cars, the one thing you'll notice is that a lot of drivers died due to teams continually pushing the envelope beyond what was reasonably safe. The same thing with doping. Look at some of the women coming out of the Soviet doping programs of the 70s and 80s. They did not, as rule, live long and healthy lives.
By the way, we can already complete a two hour marathon if any technology is allowed.
You have to somehow say what is allowed and what not, otherwise there is no point at all in competing.
And the superhuman achievements of somebody "running really fast" on the basically same base rules that apply to everyone else is exactly what competitive sports is about.
I don't like it, and it's one of the many reasons I'm not really into sports. I think there is a place for a different set of competitions - those, in which rules would not just allow, but encourage pushing the limits of technology. The bicycle race I'd love to watch would involve a electric-motor-propelled bike competing with a rocket-propelled one. Etc.
That's an interesting assertion, but it's certainly not universally true.
How much sports rules should be for the people watching and how much should be for the people playing is a constant source of tension in the rules. It's also something that people tend to forget.
Even for the most popular sports the vast majority of competitions will be watched by almost nobody and engaged in for the pure joy of it. The rules need to take these people into account too!
The bicycle race I'd love to watch would involve a
electric-motor-propelled bike...
competition to show who is the best should always be about the person and never about equipment.
Look, it'd be one thing to have little batteries and motors in the things. But these just take the energy that I've already expended and returns a bit more of it than my old shoes. But I've still got to do the work. And, hell, they're only $250 in a world of $120 race shoes, so I don't consider them to be outlandishly out of reach. Were I still obsessively racing, I'd buy a pair. And were I beaten by someone that has a pair, even if I didn't, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
So it boils down to this: how inefficient does my equipment have to be in order to follow the rules? Put a number on it, manufacturers can build to it, boom, sorted.
I believe this is exactly what they do in car racing with restrictor plates.
Creating testing rigs, define sports shoes to only return 57.3% of energy on that rig. Define full-body swim suits to have a drag coefficient of 47.2 (I'm just making up numbers). But all this hand-wringing over whether this is fair, or that is fair, seems to just be something to keep people in jobs (because I'll need to do further study at $300K/year to decide if the UCI should allow that bike or not).
The UCI bike regulations are relatively straightforward, albeit somewhat eccentric. They're based on the principles of the Lugano Charter of 1996. This charter was created largely in response to the arms race between Obree and Boardman, which led to extreme and arguably dangerous riding positions. The charter sought to limit extreme bicycle designs and riding positions, whilst still allowing for safe and useful innovation.
http://oldsite.uci.ch/imgarchive/Road/Equipment/The%20Lugano...
We can see the impact of these regulations today. The Cervelo S5 is widely regarded to be the fastest UCI-legal road bike. It is a phenomenal work of engineering, but still broadly resembles the kind of bicycle that you or I might ride around town. By contrast, a high-end triathlon bicycle, unencumbered by UCI regulations, barely resembles a bicycle at all.
The UCI regulations are a long way from perfect, but few cyclists would welcome a complete technological free-for-all.
1. Everyone gets just the equipment they were born with. Its barefoot with nothing beyond basic clothes for modesty/support. In this scenario its all about the human body and training.
2. The other end is springy shoes, aerodynamic clothing.
3. Farther down the line you have safe technology like 100% O2, autologous blood tranfusions. Nothing that permanently changes the body. If you think some of these things are dangerous, I'd counter that the sport itself is dangerous and well known for its injuries.
3a. Even farther you have the things that can cause permanent changes/death for the athelete. EPO, steroids, Perfluorocarbons etc.
How about Pistorius style blades that extend your feet? There's no external power source[1] so would that be okay in your book?
[1]: *Assuming they're not "primed" by compressing them prior to the race starting so you bounce off the starter.
Also see: flippers.
I think it'd be an interesting thing to study. When I was young and running a lot, I could beat (recreational) cyclists uphill, but they would smoke me on downhills. So there might be the kernel of a fun study there.
I guess my hypothesis is that, given equally fit bikers and runners, there's an incline where they will climb at equal speeds. Furthermore, at steep inclines, the runners will be faster and at shallower inclines, the bikers will be faster.
Doesn't seem too unlikely (or interesting, actually), given the weight of the bicycle. But the general shape of the curves might be interesting.
See my reply parallel to yours: how about we write that "book" and then we can all check together whether or not it's "okay" in that book. In contrast to a chronic case of never-ending what-aboutism.
But to answer your question directly: carbon blades would be consistent with what I've written in this thread.
This whole thread is full of people staggeringly ignorant of physical sport and competition.
Well it got them an ad disguised as a feature article in the New York Times. Go with what works.
To put it into perspective, you need to keep pace with the ghost of the current 30km record holder by within a few seconds, and then finish off the last 12.2km on horribly depleted and beat up legs at the same or very slightly slower pace. For those who have completed a hard marathon, you know the pain and damage cuts deep past the 32km (20 mile) mark and often takes athletes up to a month of recovery before a regular training can be picked up again.
It's mind-boggling the difference in human performance a 2:02:57 marathon performance is from a 1:59:59 one. I can't make enough popcorn for this. It's going to be a very exciting next couple of years in the running world. Already, we've seen an honest attempt at a world record a couple weeks ago at the Tokyo marathon that fell short. Above all else, the doubters (like myself) want to desperately be proven wrong and want to see it done legitimately.
Are you referring to Breaking2 as "legitimate"? I was hyped on the initial announcement, but between the technology, the shitload of pacers, and now running on a car racing track it is just going 100% publicity stunt and any result isn't going to feel legitimate to me.
Well, duh. I don't think there's anybody who's like, "yeah a 2hr. marathon would be awesome but only if run on an Italian racetrack."
http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/
As much as it would be nice to see a sub2 done as a team-effort with rabbits, it'll be cool to eventually see the person who has won the genetic-freak lottery (insane Vo2 max, stride rate, efficiency, etc) and dominates the field all on their own... someone who is the distance equivalent of Usain Bolt.
Especially for indoor venues that seems completely possible.
> shoes began to incorporate air bladders and gels for cushioning
And yet springs are illegal. But an air bladder is a spring, no matter that they call it "for cushioning".
Everything that "absorbs energy and returns it" is a spring.
(I think that coming closer to a definition of spring would be "stores mechanical energy through compression and releases it through expansion").
I think that you could somewhat legitimately differentiate between an object that stores mechanical energy and releases it due to its atomic structure (ie, every object), and one which stores and releases it at an improved ratio due to macroscopic structure, such as a, well, traditional spring.
The original olympics were conducted naked, weren't they? That's not to say that naked is the answer, but wearing cyber legs or sharkskin suits or even springy shoes would all have been off-limits thousands of years ago. Back then it was all about one human body vs. another. Back to basics, I say!
If so, one could argue they should ban those tracks, too. Modern tracks have nine lanes. The outer eight are optimized for use by sprinters, the innermost one is softer to prevent injuries to 5 and 10k runners.
That is more pronounced in gymnastics. If you held a tournament today using equipment of fifty years ago, I bet half the competitors would break a leg or an ankle.
Edit - Grammar & typos
Other feds are attracting lifters by allowing multi-ply gear, not using an approved gear list for single ply, and not mandating the exact shape of your underpants when competing (seriously), and allowing for specialty bars for each lift.[1]
If the IAAF wants to go down this rabbit hole of limiting the assistance that equipment may provide, they might end up with a list of approved shoes if they aren't careful, or breaking the race into barefoot, foam sole, and springy sole divisions. That just increases the cognitive load for fans and in my opinion decreases the prestige of the various champions who have an asterisk by their records.
[1] There's also the whole angle of drug testing: the IPF is the premier drug tested international fed and the USAPL (its US affiliate) is the premier fed in the US. Competing feds without drug testing have actually started adding tested divisions presumably to attract lifters who want to be competitive without drugs.
Before judging him, I'd listen to the interview and his interview on Joe Rogan.
Point being, especially in cycling, people are always finding new ways to cheat and get an edge.
I felt like I had more of a perspective on the entire situation: biking/race culture, the proliferation of cheating becoming an arms race of sorts, etc.
I had no idea that cheating in bike racing was so prevalent, I suppose that makes me a bit naive.
Armstrong was the chief enforcer of the Omerta, the code of silence that allowed doping to continue unabated. Other riders might be able to claim that they simply went along with the culture of doping, that they were coerced by team bosses, that they had no choice but to dope if they wanted to pay their bills.
Armstrong has no such excuses. He personally oversaw the USPS doping programme, he personally ensured that anyone who spoke about doping was made a pariah in the sport. He intimidated members of his own team. He libelled reporters whilst falsely suing them for libel. He exploited the goodwill of cancer survivors to protect his own deceit.
Armstrong tore the heart out of our sport and left a litany of ruined lives in his wake.
But there's no energy storage, as with these Nike running shoes.
There is probably always going to be some technological advantage found with various sportswear. In some sense, the "fairest" option is to just make everyone wear "equally capable" sportswear. In swimming, everyone wears the same swimsuit; in running, everyone wears the "same" shoes (quantify the benefits that are given by the shoes, and then keep everyone within those bounds).
Unfortunately, with the benefit of marketing that shoe makers get from these kinds of things, I doubt this will happen.
quantify the benefits that are given by the shoes, and
then keep everyone within those bounds
But the downside is that it's lowest-common denominator technology. Every time a manufacturer comes up with a game-changing idea, it's "unfair" because they've figured out a way to give more benefit in a way that no one else has, yet.
But this wouldn't solve the problem of doping.
I used to bike to work, but after hours of sitting I was not happy to sit on even smaller seat. I was afraid of getting hemorrhoids. Because my butt hurt. Now I usually use kick-scooter and in case of my commute it is a bit faster, because I don't have to take time to lock a bike. I just fold the scooter and take it with me. Also I don't put more pressure on my butt.
Other means of human powered transport without butt pressuring: running (and then that shoes could help), roller-blading and skateboarding.
So basically this is Nike using journalists that do not bother to do proper research to gain free publicity.
If they pitched this as "this piece of equipment lowers the entertainment value of the sport", I'd understand. However, why is performance enhancement even in a grey area?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/athletics/2017/03/07/fbi-joins-pr...
That's how they solved it for windsurfing - just forced everyone to ride the same exact gear, no matter the weight of the athlete or how strong the wind is, even though normally these two factors are absolutely defining when you select which sail/board to ride.
The rule
“must not be constructed so as to give an athlete
any unfair additional assistance, including by the
incorporation of any technology which will give the
wearer any unfair advantage.”