![track spike track spike](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/74/cc/f4/74ccf4be1aba4e902e50ddd0ad521366.jpg)
Since prototypes first started to show up in 2019, the men’s and women’s 5,000- and 10,000-meter world records have all been smashed. But the tests he used for the Vaporfly only work at relatively slow running speeds-so for the track spikes, all we have is the vague sense that people are running really fast. It was Hoogkamer, along with his colleagues in Rodger Kram’s research group at the University of Colorado, who performed the original study showing that Nike’s Vaporfly was four percent more efficient than rival shoes. But a new preprint (meaning an academic paper that hasn’t yet been through peer review), from a group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by Wouter Hoogkamer and Laura Healey, takes a first stab at explaining how the super spikes might work and what the key components are. In fact, because of the physiological differences between middle-distance running and marathoning, it’s not even clear how you’d test that. While the original Vaporfly was marketed based on its backed-by-science performance advantage, the new super spikes haven’t been accompanied by any specific claims of how fast they are. On the track, in contrast, a new generation of super spikes, loosely modeled on the foam-and-carbon-plate marathon shoes, is upending the record books-but so far no one is entirely sure how they work, how much time they save, and whether rival shoe companies can match Nike’s head start. It may not be a perfectly level playing field, but it never is. Sure, the marathoners will be wearing new-generation shoes, but that technology is now well-known and available from a wide variety of shoe brands. In Tokyo, it’ll be all about track spikes. For the next few years, shoe technology was pretty much the only thing runners talked about. The top three finishers in the men’s marathon and the winner of the women’s marathon were all wearing disguised Nike prototypes with thick soles and curved carbon-fiber plates, of the type that would later be revealed to offer a four percent efficiency boost compared to the best road-racing shoes of the time.
![track spike track spike](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/running-spikes-1522082537.jpg)
The 2016 Olympics were the Vaporfly Games, even though no one knew it at the time.