When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the end line on the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was ready on the sidelines to gather his sneakers. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the facet of the sneakers, waited for him to take some pictures with them, after which whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
In that second, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 grew to become the quickest shoe on the planet.
Sawe was the primary individual to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race, adopted intently by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who completed with a time of 1:59.41. Fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set a ladies’s world file of two:15.41. All three of those runners, who’re official Adidas companions, wore the Evo 3.
The Evo 3 is the lightest, quickest race shoe Adidas has ever made. Its design is altering the sport for each different athletic firm available on the market.
Within the days for the reason that race, consciousness of the Evo 3, which Adidas first unveiled on April 23, has skyrocketed. Marc Makowski, Adidas’s SVP of innovation, says an preliminary restricted launch of 200 pairs bought out in lower than two minutes (they’re already reselling on-line for up to $4,000). Adidas expects to drop a number of extra restricted runs of the shoe within the coming months, adopted by a extra broadly accessible business iteration of the design across the Berlin Marathon in September.
However, for Adidas, the Evo 3 represents way more than its potential business success: It’s proof, on the world stage, that the model is on the chopping fringe of marathon operating innovation. That’s a standing that different manufacturers have been doggedly competing to realize, together with Nike with its Alphafly 3 (worn by the earlier all-time marathon file holder, Kelvin Kiptum), On with its LightSpray technology, and Asics with its Metaspeed Edge.
“Marathon racing is, in our business, a bit like F1 within the automotive business,” Makowski says. “It’s turn out to be that battleground the place, as a model, if you wish to showcase your efficiency credibility, that’s the place you do it.”
It’s an intense race to design probably the most high-tech “supershoe” available on the market—and, for now, Adidas is within the lead.
A shoe that weighs lower than a bar of cleaning soap
Adidas has been growing ultra-light trainers for greater than three years as a part of its Adizero Adios Professional effort. The aim, Makowski says, is to work with elite athletes to search out out “what it actually takes to supply the quickest operating shoe.”
The workforce’s first key perception: It will must embrace a literal “much less is extra” method. Like in F1 racing, even the smallest design particulars can have a tide-turning influence on efficiency in elite marathon operating—particularly with regards to weight. Adidas’s professional athletes informed the workforce that they have been in search of the lightest doable shoe that would nonetheless supply stability, cushioning, and traction.
Alasdhair Willis, chief artistic officer at Adidas, says {that a} minimalist method is nothing new for the corporate’s design workforce: “After I got here to the model, I used to be engaged on a undertaking referred to as Undertaking Silence, which was about the concept, while you minimize away the noise, the silence will get louder. It’s this sense of decreasing, eradicating the superfluous to get us all the way down to the essence of what’s required.”
Makowski explains that previous to Evo, Adidas’s skilled trainers averaged round 230 grams. After in-house testing, the design workforce discovered that taking round 100 grams off of that complete may obtain a 1% discount in operating financial system (a key measurement of a runners’ physiological efficiency).
One % may sound like a small blip, however Makowski’s workforce discovered that it may probably shave 60 seconds off of a complete marathon time.
The primary Evo launched in September 2023 and weighed in at 138 grams. The Evo 2 arrived in April 2025 and had the identical common weight. Each of those fashions produced main outcomes: Adidas says the 2 sneakers helped their athletes break three world data and win over 30 key street races, together with six World Marathon Main wins, seven nationwide data, 5 course data, and one Olympic file time.
Then, final September, Sabastian Sawe stepped out within the Evo 2 to run the Berlin Marathon. He hit a record-breaking time of two:02:16, regardless of intensely sizzling climate—main many followers to take a position that with a extra snug temperature, he may’ve clinched the primary sub-two-hour time then and there.
“That second then additional accelerated quite a lot of the work, as a result of we felt like we had it, and it one way or the other bought taken away from us by the climate circumstances,” Makowski says. “So we thought, Okay, what else can we do from a product perspective to take our future much more into our palms?’”
The reply was a moonshot design idea that may stretch Adidas’s innovation chops to their limits: A supershoe weighing lower than 100 grams.
Foam, carbon, and kitesurfing
The workforce reworked the whole design of the Evo, from stitching to laces, to carry the whole weight down in virtually imperceptible increments.
Essentially the most crucial aspect of the design was its foam base, which cushions the athletes’ foot and gives most vitality return. Basically, it wanted to perform like a spring propelling the foot up and ahead.
For the bottom of the Evo 2, Makowski’s workforce created a 39 millimeter stack of proprietary foam, referred to as Lightstrike. For the Evo 3, they went again to the drafting board to plot an up to date Lightstrike components that would stand at the very same peak, simply with much less complete density.
Whereas Makowski says the precise recipe is beneath wraps, the method typically entailed figuring out which lighter chemical compounds within the combine might be bumped as much as the next complete of the composition, whereas additionally mixing a higher ratio of air into the froth.
“Finally, what we’ve achieved is created a foam that’s 50% lighter than its predecessor with 11% extra vitality return,” Makowski says.
With such a thick piece of froth cushioning the foot, the Evo 3 wanted to be stabilized with a structural part sandwiched contained in the Lightstrike layer. To resolve this drawback on the Evo 2, the workforce had already designed a five-fingered rod system—think about this like a structural plate within the form of a variety hand—to maintain the only real steady.
With the Evo 3, although, that part proved too heavy. Makowski’s workforce stripped it again from 5 rods to only one horseshoe-shaped carbon-fiber-infused piece (named the Energyrim) that circles across the bulk of the froth.
When it got here time to design the higher materials of the Evo 3, the design workforce shortly realized that not one of the typical supplies readily available would permit them to achieve their weight aim. They began different industries that could be utilizing ultra-light supplies. They landed on an surprising supply of inspiration: kitesurfing.
“We checked out skinny, light-weight foils that really have a excessive stage of rigidity and stability, after which we embedded polyester yarns which have a 50% increased energy than an everyday polyester yarn,” Makowski says. “We created an higher that’s ultra-light, however offers you far more stability than what you’d get from some other present light-weight materials.”
In a collection of ultimate touches, the workforce stripped away any pointless stitching on the higher part, added a strategically positioned sole for traction, and created stretchy laces to cut back their complete size and weight. After numerous prototypes and rounds of testing within the Herzogenaurach lab and with athletes at Adidas’s amenities in Kenya and Ethiopia, the Evo 3 was full. It weighs 97 grams: about the identical as a pack of playing cards, a bar of cleaning soap, or 4 small batteries.
“There have been moments once we handed athletes the shoe in a field, they picked it up, and so they’re like, ‘You gave me an empty field,’” Makowski remembers. “The field weighs greater than the precise shoe.”
The race to design the following supershoe
The Evo 3 is already proving to be a vibrant spot for Adidas’s enterprise. The day after the London Marathon, the corporate noticed a small enhance in share costs as buyers reacted to protection of the shoe. Shares rose even further on April 29, when the model revealed sturdy first quarter monetary outcomes—together with a complete 14% income improve yr over yr, pushed partly by a ten% soar in operating gear gross sales.
Going ahead, Makowski says, the model plans to use among the new applied sciences and strategies that it developed for the Evo 3 to different sneakers within the Adidas catalog. Willis says that the shoe’s success is certain to have a “materials impact on the enterprise from a business standpoint.” Extra importantly, although, he hopes that it begins to place Adidas as extra of an “innovation model” that’s always cooking up its subsequent groundbreaking design.
“You’ll be able to’t be a really profitable sports activities model if you happen to’re not profitable in operating,” Willis says. “We’ve been actually closely dedicated to successful the efficiency race class for the final three or 4 years. It’s clearly fairly actually a race when it comes to how shortly innovation will be dropped at the market—and to the athlete.”
