Supershoes or superhumans? A controlled analysis of sex-specific road-running performance evolution in the era of advanced footwear technology.

Abstract

Advanced footwear technology (AFT) improves running economy and is credited with recent performance improvements in road running, with observational analyses consistently demonstrating that women have improved more than men. In contrast, laboratory studies generally report similar running economy responses to AFT in both sexes, leaving the observational-experimental divergence unresolved. A fundamental limitation of observational work is the absence of a control condition, making it impossible to separate AFT-related gains from concurrent performance trends. We addressed this by comparing performances between pre-AFT (2009-2015) and AFT (2017-2024) eras across road-running events (10 km, half marathon, marathon) and throwing events, the latter serving as an active control condition exposed to several shared broad temporal influences within elite athletics but unaffected by advances in footwear technology. The top 50 performances per event, era, and sex were converted to World Athletics points and analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. Performances improved between eras (β = 0.294, P < 0.001), with gains substantially larger in road running than in throwing (β = 0.731, P < 0.001). The sex-specific pattern of improvement also differed between event categories (era × event type × sex interaction, β = 0.786, P < 0.001): road-running improvements were greater in women than men (4.51% vs. 2.62%), whereas throwing improvements did not differ by sex (0.93% vs. 1.15%). This sex-specific divergence between event families strengthens ecological evidence that AFT contributed to greater gains in women's road-running performance than men's, although concurrent running-specific influences cannot be excluded. The contrast with laboratory findings raises the possibility that conventional protocols may not fully capture sex-specific competitive effects of AFT.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Elite women's road-running performance improved substantially more than men's during the era of advanced footwear technology (AFT). In contrast, throwing events, exposed to similar era-level trends but unaffected by footwear, showed no comparable sex difference. This comparison provides novel ecological evidence supporting the notion that AFT contributed to greater road-running performance gains in women than men and raises the possibility that current laboratory protocols may not fully capture sex-specific competitive effects of AFT.