When we talked to Ato Boldon on the podcast this week, he talked about how the track manufactures always feel pressure to spruce up the track to produce WRs at the Olympics. Will it happen again in 2024?
But Alessandro Piceli, a research and development manager at Mondo, believes that the latest version – which the Guardian understands was debuted at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest last year – is even better than the one used in Japan.
“We are focusing on the dynamic connection between the track and a new generation of shoes,” he says. “For the track, we only see the aesthetics, but there is great work that goes into the underlayer.
“A new granule of polymeric material, made especially for it, was inserted in the Tokyo track. We have made it even better now. We have chemists, engineers and physicists who take care of the performance of the material.”
In this episode of the LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast, the hosts Jonathan Gault, Robert, and Weldon Johnson dive into the latest news in the world of track and field. They discuss the recent London then turn to the Paris Olym...
Fine tuning in general for the vague category of "super shoes" probably inadvertently creates a larger disparity between different types of super shoes, and especially sprint vs. distance shoes. Will be interesting to see if there is an apparent advantage for one over the other (although temps being especially cool or hot could outweigh any differences caused by the track).
2012 London was really the first super-track but 2016 Rio set the standard for next-gen
We'll never forget that women's 10,000m it was epic, WR and like two dozen national and personal records.
When something takes off a second per lap and you've then got 25 laps, well stuff happens, but not sure how much more room for improvement they've got.
At least it's an even "battlefield" for all compared to the shoes.
why don't they just put springs in the track like they have under the floor in gymnastics since there is no integrity left in the sport anyway? I mean if you can put springs (essentially) in the shoes, why not in the track itself?
Between doping and super shoes records are meaningless already.
The farce is up. We know what's going on. 0% interest - ok maybe 1%.
All of this stuff just comes full circle. The "tuning the track for modern spikes" angle is exactly what you are going to and should be saying if you are at Mondo, but none of this is rocket science.
The compression and rebound of any surface/material (especially in this realm) ultimately results in some form of energy loss. Foams aren't and never will be 100% efficient (even the best are in the 80-85% range) and neither are tracks (I have no idea on their numbers).
This is really easy to put into context - when "supershoes" first came out, the selling proposition was literally a number - 4%, as in the combination of properties in the production lead to a measurable increase in running economy and we know that brands were able to evolve products and end up with products that gave RE increases as high as 6% (ZVF, AF and even the Adidas Adios Pro).
When "superspikes" came out, and still to this day, there has never been any mention from any brand of what a similar number is for their products and that's not just a marketing oversight. It's because the numbers are way, way lower - low enough, especially in comparison to the road product, that it isn't worth even mentioning. The reasons for this are pretty straight forward. 1) The magic in these products (the foams) is not substantial enough to create a large benefit like in the road shoes (in even the most cushioned spikes you are talking maybe a true 8mm of foam under your foot - the thickness you visually see is just a sidewall height to make it look like more) and 2) the track surfaces have (again obviously) far more resiliency and cushion than the asphalt of the road.
In 1996 the Atlanta games were slightly controversial with respect to how hard the track was. Gebrselassie was the most famous critic and had special adistars made for him it was so hard. But it was also fast - it was basically a oval road surface. Tracks then became softer and more "bouncy" throughout the 2000's as product got more and more minimal. The best metaphor to think of is when you bounce on a trampoline - you fix your knees so they are rigid because this creates the most efficient energy scenario. You bend them when you want to bounce less and eventually stop bouncing - "double trampoline" effect.
By London and Rio we had very compliant and bouncy track surfaces to go along with very minimal and firm product. Now we are shifting the other way as product is becoming more substantial and bouncy. Tokyo was a nice inflection point of this but by this point Mondo had already started to trend back to thinner track surfaces with less structure underneath them and this worked perfectly with the first gen of "superspike" product. They have simply recognized this and honestly, my guess would be that if we looked at this track and the track of Atlanta in 1996 and compared the properties of both then we would find they were really similar. The big difference is that back then athletes were still running in thin EVA cushioned product (if they even had anything at all) which was a scenario for fast running, but they also mashed their legs doing so (think 3 rounds of an 8 or 1500 compounding on each other or even 25 cumulative laps of pounding in your two 5000m races and one 10000m race). Basically now the "bounce" in the shoe>track interaction has flipped to the shoes and not the track - that's all.
I don't think we see a situation where in a one-off performance, this current formula of product to track makes a huge difference. Where the huge difference will come is that the athletes will be getting through to finals with substantially less cumulative fatigue in their legs because cushioned shoes/firm track is a far better long term equation (across 3 races in 4 days etc) than firm shoes/cushioned track.
This post was edited 3 minutes after it was posted.
why don't they just put springs in the track like they have under the floor in gymnastics since there is no integrity left in the sport anyway? I mean if you can put springs (essentially) in the shoes, why not in the track itself?
Between doping and super shoes records are meaningless already.
The farce is up. We know what's going on. 0% interest - ok maybe 1%.
Cool - don't watch then. Enjoy the next two weeks away from the TV screen.
When we talked to Ato Boldon on the podcast this week, he talked about how the track manufactures always feel pressure to spruce up the track to produce WRs at the Olympics. Will it happen again in 2024?
But Alessandro Piceli, a research and development manager at Mondo, believes that the latest version – which the Guardian understands was debuted at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest last year – is even better than the one used in Japan.
“We are focusing on the dynamic connection between the track and a new generation of shoes,” he says. “For the track, we only see the aesthetics, but there is great work that goes into the underlayer.
“A new granule of polymeric material, made especially for it, was inserted in the Tokyo track. We have made it even better now. We have chemists, engineers and physicists who take care of the performance of the material.”
“Beneath the purple lies a rubber track with two layers. The lower level has honeycomb cells, where air absorbs the shock of your foot landing, then pushes out, feeding the energy back as your foot takes off.“
For every single Olympic games Mondo puts out the same old tired PR that they've created the "fastest track ever" and it's now 2% faster than the previous one or something like that.
But if you add up all these supposed improvements over the years, the times should have dropped more than 10% since Sydney. That's like a minute and a half in the 5000. Doesn't add up.
It's the same old product, people. Maybe with some minor tweaks and a flashy new color. But they definitely don't have all these mad scientists over at Mondo working on some moonshot product to create the bounciest material ever.
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