97 grams is roughly the weight of a small banana. It is also the weight of a running shoe that helped make history.
When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the 2026 TCS London Marathon in less than two hours – 1:59:30 to be precise – he was wearing less than four ounces of foam, carbon fibre, and three years of materials science. The Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is more than a shoe.
Adidas swept three of the six podium spots on Sunday: the men’s winner, the men’s runner-up, and the women’s winner. Both world records now belong to athletes in three-stripe kit. Yomif Kejelcha, also in the Pro Evo 3, crossed in 1:59:41 in his marathon debut. Tigst Assefa set a women’s-only world record of 2:15:41. If you were Nike, you would have spent Sunday evening staring at the ceiling.
The engineering behind the miracle
The Pro Evo 3 in a men’s size 9.5 is Adidas’s first running shoe under 100 grams, and by the brand’s claim, the lightest race-legal model in the industry. That is a 30 per cent reduction over the Pro Evo 2. Most of the weight comes out through a new Lightstrike Pro Evo foam compound that is 50 per cent lighter than its predecessors. Designers took inspiration from kitesurfing sails to produce the woven upper.
There is also a structural rethink at work. Where most shoes use a carbon plate running the full length of the foot, Adidas uses carbon rods that mirror the foot’s metatarsal bones, with an ENERGYRIM running around the outer edge of the foam, maximising propulsive material underfoot. Adidas claim the Pro Evo 3 delivers an 11 per cent increase in forefoot energy return and a 1.6 per cent improvement in running economy over its predecessor. Small numbers that, at a 1:59-marathon pace, opened the door to history.
The shoe costs $500. Within 24 hours of going on sale, it was trading on StockX for an average resale asking price of $2,627. The market has its own views on running economy.
A brand reborn
Adidas’ triumph on Sunday did not come from a position of dominance. Four years ago, the brand was in genuine trouble. The Yeezy collaboration with Kanye West, which had accounted for somewhere between $1-2 billion in annual revenue, collapsed spectacularly at the end of 2022, leaving Adidas holding huge sums in unsold inventory and a significant reputational bruise.
The recovery has been methodical. Adidas netted an operating profit of around $2.4 billion in 2025, a 54 per cent increase over 2024. CEO Bjørn Gulden rebuilt the brand around a twin engine of performance credibility on the track, and cultural heat in the street. The Adizero Pro Evo 2 was the most successful running shoe of 2025, with the Pro Evo 1 the second-most successful. Between them they won six World Marathon Majors in 2025. Sunday was the crowning glory of a racethree years in the making.
The cracks in the house that Nike built
Nike is still the market leader in both revenues and brand equity. Anchored by Nike, Jordan, and Converse, it covers nearly 190 countries. It has deep pockets, global distribution, and on its best days an unmatched ability to fuse sport with culture. It was, lest we forget, a Nike athlete, Eliud Kipchoge who first broke the two-hour barrier, in 2019. But the run was a choreographed time trial rather than a competitive race.
Nike is currently in what analysts politely call a transition. The company is rebalancing wholesale partnerships, accelerating innovation cycles, refreshing product lines, tightening inventory. Its 0.3 percentage-point market share decline in 2025 signals difficulty retaining younger consumers, and its reliance on legacy lines like Air Force 1 limits room to manoeuvre in a market that wants something new. The “Win Now” strategy is its attempt at course correction. Whether it can catch up remains to be seen.
For three decades, Nike’s defining proposition was performance as identity. The Swoosh sold athletic aspiration. Adidas, content for years to be Europe’s more fashion-conscious alternative, now leads on performance credibility. That is a meaningful reversal.
The competition has several fronts
Running shoes are the symbolic frontier. The real battle runs across four distinct areas.
Athlete endorsements remain the most visible. Nike’s stable that includes Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Alysa Liusets a gold standard for sports marketing. Adidas’s roster is not exactly a supporting cast, with Yamine Lamal, Candace Parker and Rishabh Pant among others. And now Sawe, Assefa and Kejelcha are names being written into the record books.
Cultural partnerships have become equally decisive. Adidas has tied collaborations to the Oasis Live ’25 tour, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, and designers including Hermès menswear creative director Grace Wales Bonner. These are cultural positioning plays to a generation of consumers for whom the line between athletic wear and fashion week has dissolved.
Sustainability is the third front, and the terrain is murkier. Both brands have made ambitious commitments; neither has fully delivered. Consumer scrutiny will only intensify.
Direct-to-consumer channels define the fourth. Nike pushed aggressively into DTC during the pandemic, cutting wholesale partners, then invited many of them back when the numbers disappointed. Adidas has been more measured, and the steadier approach appears, for now, to be paying off.
What the MBA classroom should take from this
A rivalry like Nike vs. Adidas is useful to business school professsors because it illustrates several strategic theories simultaneously, and sometimes contradictorily.
The innovator’s dilemma is in plain sight. Nike’s dominance in running, built on decades of proprietary technology and athlete trust, may itself be the constraint on its ability to respond to a competitor moving faster. The company that defined “just do it” is perhaps too invested in what it already has.
The Adidas comeback contains a different lesson. Losing Yeezy should, by conventional logic, have been catastrophic. Forced to rebuild on product merit and creative partnerships, the brand has emerged more coherent. Crisis, handled with discipline, can clarify what a company actually is.
The third less glamorous lesson is that engineering takes time. A 97-gram shoe does not emerge from a brainstorming session. It comes from years of materials science, athlete feedback loops, and iterative manufacturing. Since launching in April 2025, the Adizero Adios Pro Evo line has helped Adidas athletes break three world records, win over 30 key road races, claim six World Marathon Major victories, seven national records, five course records, and one Olympic record. That is a product development record, accumulated over years.
The final question is what winning actually means. Sunday’s result in London will shift perception, generate coverage, and move a few decimal points of market share. It will not, on its own, decide a rivalry that spans hundreds of product categories, dozens of geographies, and billions of individual purchase decisions. Nike will respond – it always does. The Vaporfly era, which rewrote marathon running, was not built in a weekend.
But for one morning, on the streets of London, a shoe that weighed less than a smartphone put three-stripe athletes on top of the world. Adidas has earned the right to enjoy that.
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