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Yesterday I sat in a product training for the new adidas Adios Pro 5, and during the presentation an interesting discussion started. The tech rep was talking about how the Adios line has consistently produced top-tier racing shoes over the years, and that adidas consistently makes the FASTEST shoes. I put that in caps because it’s the whole point of this post. I pushed back. My argument was that adidas doesn’t necessarily have the fastest shoe but an incredibly deep pool of great athletes. And there’s lab data suggesting another shoe is actually more efficient. In 2025, Wouter Hoogkamer and his team at UMass Amherst found that the PUMA Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 was 3.15% to 3.62% more economical than both the Nike Alphafly 3 and the adidas Adios Pro Evo 1. Every one of the 15 runners in the study was more economical in the PUMA. That’s a big number in a field where the differences between super shoes have been around 1% for years. So if the PUMA is the most efficient shoe, where are the PUMA podiums? There aren’t any. In the 2026 World Marathon Majors so far, adidas has 20 podium places, and PUMA has none. The fastest PUMA-sponsored athlete ever is Amanal Petros, who ran 2:04:03 in Valencia last December. That makes him the 52nd fastest marathoner of all time. That got me curious, so I went through the 51 men ahead of him and checked which brand each of them wore in his fastest marathon. Some of it came from race reports, and some of it I checked myself by watching race footage. This is the full top 52: Adidas: 25 Nike: 21 ASICS: 4 PUMA: 1 Li-Ning: 1 At first glance, that looks like a win for the tech rep. But the timing tells a more interesting story. The old world records from before super shoes were mostly set in adidas: Gebrselassie, Makau, Kimetto. Then from roughly 2019 to 2024, it was Nike’s era. Kipchoge, Bekele, Kiptum, and a long list of others ran their fastest times in the Vaporfly and Alphafly. And then in 2026, adidas came back in a huge way. There have been 23 sub-2:04 marathons this year, more than double any previous year, and 15 of them were run in Adidas. Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London in the Adios Pro Evo 3, and Yomif Kejelcha ran 1:59:41 behind him in the same shoe, in his debut. So the list isn’t really “adidas versus everyone.” It’s three different eras stacked on top of each other. Now for the part that weakens my own argument. If adidas’s dominance was only about having the deepest athlete pool, you wouldn’t expect athletes who were already with adidas to suddenly get much faster. But that’s exactly what happened in 2026. Amos Kipruto won Chicago in 2:01:09 at 34 years old. Guye Adola ran his first PB in nine years at 35 to win Berlin. Lemi Berhanu took a full minute off his best at 32 to win Amsterdam. These guys were adidas athletes before the Evo 3. A bigger athlete pool doesn’t explain why the same men suddenly ran so much faster. Something changed this year, and the shoe is the obvious candidate. I still believe Sawe would be the best marathoner in the world in any top shoe, but whether he’d have broken two hours without the Evo 3 is something none of us can know. And there’s a part that weakens the PUMA case as well. The Hoogkamer study was funded by PUMA, and one of the co-authors is a PUMA employee. It also tested 15 runners at recreational speeds, not elites running 2:55 per kilometre. To be fair, Hoogkamer also ran the original Nike study that found the Vaporfly’s 4% benefit, and those results held up in real races. So I don’t think the numbers are made up. But economy in a lab at recreational pace isn’t the same as performance in the final 10K of a major. What I find telling is this: Petros wore the Fast-R3 at the 2025 World Championships marathon. He ran exactly the same time as the winner, Alphonce Simbu, and lost gold on a photo finish. The shoe clearly isn’t slow. It just has almost nobody on the start line. When one brand has 25 of the fastest 52 runners and another has one, the podium count tells you more about the athlete pool than about the shoe. There’s one more detail worth pointing out. The shoe winning all those podiums is the Evo 3. That’s a $500, 97-gram, limited-release hyper shoe. The Pro 5, the shoe we were being trained on, is the one in stores. When someone says “the Adios line is the fastest,” a lot of that credibility is borrowed from a shoe most runners will never race in. Then we got to contracts. The tech rep made a good counter-argument: elite runners choose adidas because they believe the brand consistently makes good products. My response was that they probably signed because the contract was the biggest. I can’t prove that, because nobody publishes these contracts. But I still think money explains the athlete pool better than belief in the product does. Adidas can afford to sign the best runners early, sometimes whole training groups at once, and keep them for years. Sawe was already a half marathon world champion before he ran his first marathon, and Adidas had him long before he broke two hours. Once you have that many of the best athletes, you’re going to win most of the races, whatever shoe you put them in. And that’s really my point. Look at that podium table again. It doesn’t show which shoe is the fastest. It shows which brand has the fastest athletes on the start line. Those aren’t the same thing. Do I think the Evo 3 is a great shoe? Yes. The veteran PBs this year are hard to ignore, and I’d be lying if I said the shoe has nothing to do with it. But “adidas makes the FASTEST shoes” is a claim the podium can’t prove. So when someone tells you a brand makes the fastest shoe because their athletes keep winning, ask the follow-up question: is it the shoe, or is it who’s wearing it?