When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
In that moment, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 became the fastest shoe in the world.
Sawe was the first person to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race, followed closely by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who finished with a time of 1:59.41. Fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set a women’s world record of 2:15.41. All three of these runners, who are official Adidas partners, wore the Evo 3.
The Evo 3 is the lightest, fastest race shoe Adidas has ever made. Its design is changing the game for every other athletic company on the market.
In the days since the race, awareness of the Evo 3, which Adidas first unveiled on April 23, has skyrocketed. Marc Makowski, Adidas’s SVP of innovation, says an initial limited launch of 200 pairs sold out in less than two minutes (they’re already reselling online for up to $4,000). Adidas expects to drop several more limited runs of the shoe in the coming months, followed by a more broadly available commercial iteration of the design around the Berlin Marathon in September.
But, for Adidas, the Evo 3 represents much more than its potential commercial success: It’s proof, on the world stage, that the brand is on the cutting edge of marathon running innovation. That’s a status that other brands have been doggedly competing to achieve, including Nike with its Alphafly 3 (worn by the previous all-time marathon record holder, Kelvin Kiptum), On with its LightSpray technology, and Asics with its Metaspeed Edge.
“Marathon racing is, in our industry, a bit like F1 in the automotive industry,” Makowski says. “It’s become that battleground where, as a brand, if you want to showcase your performance credibility, that’s where you do it.”
