Photo: Reuters
Three years ago, the Tokyo Olympics signaled a new era in track and field, with a 51% increase in national records compared to the previous edition, driven by super athletes, supershoes and a super track. Three years, two world championships and one Netflix series later, the Paris Olympics provided another opportunity to continue the sport’s purple patch on the greatest stage of all.
How good were the performances?
Better than ever, according to the World Athletics Competition Rankings, which allocate athlete performances a score based on the World Athletics points tables. Historical comparisons can be murky when new events are added, such as the mixed relays joining the World Championship program from 2017 onwards, but the score from Paris comfortably exceeds that of Tokyo, as well as the scores from the 2022 and 2023 World Championships, to rank as the greatest on record.
Although there was an unsurprising dip in the amount of national records set after the recalibration of the record books in Tokyo, 13 Olympic records were set in Paris - five more than three years earlier.
The party in Paris was undeniably headlined by the two individual world record breakers. For context, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s 50.37sec 400m hurdles is the points equivalent of a 10.46sec 100m, whereas Mondo’s 6.25m vault equates to a 3:23.73 1500m.
Beyond the peak, the bronze medal performances in the men’s 10,000m, 1500m and marathon would have been sufficient for gold in any other edition of the Olympics. The men’s javelin gold medal winning performance in Tokyo would have only placed sixth in Paris, three of the top ten 800m times in history were dropped in the men’s final, and Tebogo and McLaughlin-Levrone both dropped 400m relay splits ranked in the top three of all time. The heroics continued until the very last event, with Sifan Hassan winning gold in the marathon to finish with three medals - a feat that hasn’t been achieved in distance events since Emil Zátopek won triple gold at Helsinki 1952. In doing so, Hassan broke the Olympic marathon record (as did Ethiopia's Tamirat Tola in the men’s), despite an undulating course which had nearly double the elevation gain of the hilliest course on the World Marathon major circuit.
So there it is - we didn’t just get caught up in the romance of the City of Love - the performances were actually that good.
Why has athletics hit a purple patch?
As we edge closer towards the undefined limits of human potential, many of the recent advancements in athletic performances may be as much technological as they are physiological. As I explained to BBC following the 2021 Games, the new era of performances in track and field was born largely through a new breed of shoes and track surfaces. Both were again at play in Paris, with recent updates adding more fuel to the fire.
1. The Shoes
It’s been almost a decade since Nike first wedged a curved carbon-fibre plate within a thick midsole of next-gen foam to create the first iteration of supershoes, thereby decimating the record books. If you’re still not a believer in their performance enhancing effects, look no further than the all-time lists, where you’ll find that only seven of the top 100 women’s marathon times in history precede the supershoe era.
Researchers are still piecing together the precise mechanisms through which the shoes provide benefit, but it’s clear that the synergy between the stiff plate and the new breed of foam improves running economy, directly translating to performance improvements.
Similar technology was first applied to track spikes in 2019, but was only widely adopted in 2020. And although we speculated that superspikes were partly responsible for the uptick in performances seen in Tokyo, we had no concrete proof. Now we do, courtesy of the world’s first peer-reviewed evidence that advanced footwear technology has significantly improved both sprinting and middle-distance performances.
So how much are they worth? Donovan Bailey audaciously claimed that his 9.84sec 100m PB would drop down to 9.4 if he used superspikes. But in truth, the improvements are not as pronounced as those produced by their chunkier road-racing siblings. Although the performance benefits of supershoes in general are highly individual, our findings indicate that superspikes provide roughly .1sec of benefit for every 100m of sprinting, which might explain why nearly a third of the Olympic records set in Paris came from the 400m events (including hurdles and relays).
How do the latest iterations of supershoes compare to those used three years ago? Adidas have perhaps made the greatest strides on the road with the release of their Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1. The shoe, which retails for 500€, weighs just 138g (40% lighter than any Adidas shoe) and is only designed to last for one marathon race - which was enough for Assefa when she set the world record in Berlin last year (side note for all Parkrunners: typical supeshoes lose their economical advantages after 450km of running). But not all upgrades have been effective - many of Nike’s male athletes raced in older versions of the Alphafly or Vaporfly in Paris rather than the most recent releases, including the people’s favourite and Nike poster boy, Eliud Kipchoge. On the track, it’s worth noting that New Balance MD-X V3 adorned the feet of the long-sprint queens Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Femke Bol and Gabby Thomas.
And so while there have been no major breakthroughs in footwear innovation since 2020, there has certainly been fine-tuning by some brands more than others. The fact that this was the first full Olympic cycle where track athletes had access to superspikes in their daily training environment, thus accumulating small gains on a session by session basis, may alone be enough to explain some of the running improvements seen in Paris.
2. The Track
Track manufacturer Mondo (now confirmed as the second most iconic Mondo in athletics after Duplantis’ latest world record antics), claimed that the Paris track is 2% faster than the Tokyo track. Interestingly, they also declared back in 2021 that the track in Tokyo provided a 2% advantage over the Rio track, and so if the current rate of improvement continues then we should expect the men’s 100m record to be down to 4.82sec by the 2152 Olympics Games.
A key feature of the new wave of tracks unveiled in Tokyo is the underlayer, consisting of a series of hexagonal cavities lengthened in the direction of running, which when deformed during ground contact act like ‘bowstrings’ to project the athlete forwards.
There’s no official word on what changed between the Tokyo and Paris tracks, only that it was tweaked to create faster times. But for what it’s worth, only two track events were won in times that were 2%+ faster than the Tokyo gold medals (out of 20 individual events on the track), perhaps indicating that Mondo’s claim came from the marketing department and not the engineering department.
One often overlooked aspect is that the shoes and track may combine to give athletes a less mechanically stressful ride, therefore reducing fatigue and muscle soreness, and ultimately helping them unleash their full potential come finals day.
In order to assess the potential influence of the shoes and track combined on the performances in Paris, we can compare across event groups against an historical reference point, just as I did for Tokyo. Using this approach, the throwers act as a rough control group due to the little interaction with the track surface (aside from javelin) and the lack of super in their shoes. Of the 8 throwing gold medals available in Paris, 50% were better than the gold medal performance in Tokyo. Meanwhile, of the 22 individual running events on and off the track, the gold medal performance in Paris eclipsed the gold medal performance in Tokyo on 16 occasions (72.7%). It’s not perfect, but it certainly fits the narrative that the new wave of athletics is anchored in running improvements, and that these improvements may be exogenously induced.
3. The Weather
After a bout of rain failed to put a dampener on the Opening Ceremony, the maximum temperatures in Paris ranged from 28-33 degrees across the athletics schedule. While it was far from ideal, it was an improvement on the similar temperatures paired with the drastically worse humidity in Tokyo three years earlier, where 50 heat related illnesses in the race walks and marathon were logged despite considerable preparation for the grueling conditions.
A clear indication that the weather was kinder in Paris than in Tokyo is that while 28.3% of athletes failed to finish the men’s Tokyo marathon, only 12.3% logged a DNF in Paris despite the latest course being described as the ‘most hellish Olympic marathon course in history’. The more favourable conditions freed athletes up to race less conservatively, which may explain why the distance events were among the most improved in Paris - 75% of distance golds were superior to the gold performances from Tokyo three years prior.
There was also a new heat management strategy unveiled in the form of a cooling headband worn by road-racing athletes. Not to be confused with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s tiara, the Omius cooling headband embraced the foreheads of Sifan Hassan and Brian Pintado as they ran (and walked) their way to glory, among many others. The headband uses a series of ‘cooling pieces’ made of graphite covered in a hydrophilic coating. Essentially, the cooling pieces provide more surface area for evaporation, thus helping to cool the skin. The manufacturers claim that a key advantage over traditional cooling methods is that as long as the pieces remain wet, in contact with the skin and uncovered, they’ll continue to operate effectively. But before you fork out the hefty $200USD to buy it, consider that the only available (pre-print) evidence indicates that in hot and humid conditions, the Omius did not significantly improve heart rate, whole-body thermal comfort, rate of perceived exertion, temperature or performance.
4. The Athletes
With all that being said, it takes more than a chunky midsole, a bouncy track and a headband to make somebody great, and to attribute athletics’ purple patch solely to technological innovation would be a gross injustice to some of the sport’s current icons. Mondo first pole vaulted at the age of three, holds the world records from the ages of 7-12 and runs faster with a pole than many elite athletes do without one (38.2km/hr). Like Mondo, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone was a world u18 champion at the age of just 15, and ran 55.63sec for the (slightly undersized) 400m hurdles at the age of 14. While the footwear trends were still stuck in the minimalist era, these athletes were maximising their athletic futures, one repetition at a time.
Further testament to the depth of the latest crop of athletes is that the current world record holders in the men’s discus, men’s 400m hurdles and women’s 100m hurdles didn’t win their events in Paris despite being the GOATs in their respective disciplines. Even science agrees that Olympic years bring out the best in everyone on both the track and the field, and this year was no exception.
Generational shifts in access, opportunity and funding may have also provided a boost to the sport recently, through the gradual removal of barriers which have previously prevented some from having the same opportunities as others. A good indication that location and access are becoming less of an issue than in previous generations is that a record 27 different countries won athletics gold medals in Paris, including four countries which had never won gold before (Dominica, Pakistan, Saint Lucia and Botswana). Even a bloke from Allora (Matty Denny) claimed a richly deserved bronze medal in the men’s discus.
Similarly, the fact that women’s world records in road-racing have recently improved twice the magnitude of men’s may not reflect sex-specific advantages from footwear, but instead may reflect the belated removal of historical, social and systemic barriers to funding, access and opportunity which have prevented women from reaching their physiological potential in both developing and developed countries (as I touched on in a recent piece). Perhaps not coincidentally, women absolutely carried Australia’s overall medal count on the way to fourth place overall.
Importantly, just because access and support have improved in some regards, doesn’t automatically mean it’s sufficient. Just ask Great British long jumper Jacob Fincha-Dukes, who returned to his full time job three days after finishing fifth in the men’s long jump final, or Pakistani javelin hero Arshad Nadeem who had to crowdfund his own training javelins on his way to an Olympic record.
5. The Drugs
It would be negligent to not mention the dark cloud (or purple haze) that follows the Olympics from city to city. Just months before the Games, it was revealed that 23 Chinese swimmers went unsanctioned despite testing positive for the banned metabolic aid trimetazidine prior to the 2021 Olympics, in a case that involved several direct violations of World Anti-Doping Authority rules.
While this case isn’t specific to athletics, it is indicative of a wider problem which unfortunately reaches the very heart of our sport. It’s an inconvenient truth that the disciplines which have seen the most progress since the supershoes and supertracks are also the most frequently listed on the doping ban list. A recent study highlighted that across the 2008-2016 Olympiads, over 30% of medals in distances 800m onwards were won by athletes who had either served a doping suspension or had been coached by somebody who had served a doping suspension. A further 55.6% of these medals were won by athletes originating from nations whose doping control lab has had its accreditation suspended or whose national anti-doping authority is on the non-compliant or watch list.
The story continued in Paris. Numerous athletes who stood on the medal dais are guided by coaches who have had multiple drug sanctions. 400m silver medalist Salwa Eid Naser is again approaching her best form after serving a two-year ban for skipping three drug tests, and in developing news, French anti-doping authorities entered the Village to raid the room of 800m bronze medalist Djamel Sedjati and his coach. Recent developments in micro-dosing strategies, recent innovations in pharmacological agents and difficulties in detecting doping despite increases in testing frequency may all help to explain why recent performances have been so compelling. But even if the current rates of doping are below other points in history, the skeletons of the past remain - 13 outdoor track and field world records still remain from the era prior to random drug testing, 11 of which are in women’s events.
It may comfort some onlookers that a string of athletes who emerged largely unscathed from recent doping scandals (despite some having photos on their phone with instructions on how to dope and get away with it) have demonstrated regressed performances ever since their cases. Whether that’s because of the stress of being subjected to a doping investigation while being innocent, or due to being off the juice after almost being caught is something we may never know.
The Verdict
It was a Games where traditions were broken - the marathons didn’t finish in the stadium, the Flame was housed at the Jardin des Tuileries, and the local Parisians were actually warm and welcoming to international tourists. True to form, the track provided a number of plot twists too - the only time the Jamaican anthem was played was for the men’s discus after their sprint queens ran into trouble, the men’s 5000m heats looked more like a Raygun routine than a track event, and a small handful of Ethiopian distance runners did more boxing out than Rudy Gobert did all Olympics.
The much discussed Repechage rounds, which offered runners in some events the opportunity to make the semi-finals after failing to do so in their heats, provided perhaps my favourite stat of the meet. By my calculations, of the 281 athletes who lined up in a repechage race, only two went on to make the final in their event, at a rate of just .71%. To make matters worse, one of these athletes was Freddie Crittenden, who intentionally jogged his 110m hurdle heat in order to buy himself another day to recover from a muscle complaint. If the purpose of the repechage is to provide an extra run on the global stage and spread out the program, then mission accomplished. If the purpose is to ensure the right athletes make the final, then it’s time to trust numbers over opinions.
Regardless of what the future holds for repechages, it’s a positive thing that World Athletics is willing to take some risks to improve the product. They already accidentally did so by being so passive with footwear regulations when records started tumbling as supershoes first emerged. Whichever side of the mechanical doping debate you’re on, it’s probably too late to turn back now, and it’s time to embrace the new normal and leverage the recent success of athletes so the sport can stay relevant to the broader public rather than fading into the background for the next four years ahead of the 2028 Games. Investments from outside the sport, a 40% increase in World Athletics website traffic compared to Tokyo, and a Netflix series will do no harm in sustaining the world’s attention span. Whether you’re a new fan or an old head, the Paris Games will go down in history.