This Adidas shoe was the common thread between those world record-breaking London Marathon runners

On April 26, all eyes turned to the London Marathon as the event became the site of multiple broken records in long-distance running. Fans watched with bated breath as their favorite athletes crossed the finish line, but there was one detail that the top runners had in common that viewers might not have noticed—and it had to do with their feet.

The marathon included multiple sport-defining highlights. Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe set a new world record of 1:59.30 (the first sub-two-hour marathon in an official race); followed by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who finished with a time of 1:59.41; while fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set a women’s world record of 2:15.41. All three of these runners were wearing the same shoe: the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3.

For Adidas, this is exactly the kind of cultural moment that’s helped the brand stage a major comeback after it was forced to end its collaboration with Kanye West at the end of 2022. Over the past several months, the brand has debuted collaborations tied to the Oasis Live ‘25 tour and Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, as well as collaborating with designers like Hermès’ menswear creative director Grace Wales Bonner. Zeitgeist-tapping partnerships like these helped Adidas net an operating profit of around $2.4 billion in 2025, a 54% increase over 2024, which was the last year that included Yeezy sales. 

This morning, Adidas stock got a small 1% boost in the wake of the Evo 3’s big moment. Here’s what to know about what Adidas calls its “supershoe.”

A history of broken records

The Evo 3 was announced on April 23, just days before the London Marathon. It went up for sale in limited quantities on April 25 (which are now sold out online) and is scheduled for a wider release in the fall. The shoe is part of Adidas’ broader Adizero Adios Pro Evo collection, first launched in 2023, which is designed specifically for long-distance runs and race days. 

According to the company, the collection has helped Adidas athletes break three world records and win over 30 key road races, including six World Marathon Major wins, seven national records, five course records, and one Olympic record time. The Evo 3, though, is the brand’s most advanced running design yet.

The anatomy of a 97-gram ‘supershoe’

The Evo 3 is composed of four main parts, from top to bottom: the upper material, which wraps around the foot; the Lightstrike Pro Evo Foam, a custom foam layer; a stiffening carbon element called the Energyrim; and a rubber outsole. Per Adidas’ official design breakdown, each of these components was painstakingly refined to deliver peak running performance at the lightest possible weight. 

The Lightstrike foam was designed specifically for the Evo 3 and weighs in at 50% the total mass of the foam used in its predecessor, the Evo 2. It’s supported by the carbon-based structural support Energyrim, also a new feature in the Evo 3, that’s engineered to maximize the volume of the shoe’s foam while providing extra stability to the sole. On the bottom, a rubber outsole is placed on the forefoot to provide what Adidas calls “reliable traction at high speeds”, without compromising weight.

In total, the Evo 3 weighs just around 97 grams—nearly 30% lighter than the Evo 2. It’s Adidas’ first-ever sub-100-gram race shoe.

“We weren’t just trying to improve on what we’d done before, we wanted to see how far we could go,” Patrick Nava, general manager of running at Adidas, wrote in a press release announcing the shoe. “We went through more than a dozen iterations, working closely with our athletes and testing everywhere from our labs in Herzogenaurach to high-altitude camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. At that level, every detail really matters—we were measuring things down to the nearest nanogram. It was a long process, but it’s led to something we believe genuinely changes what a race-day shoe can feel like.”

The outcome

For Adidas, it seems like that laser-focused attention to detail has paid off.

In a press release published on April 26, Nava wrote, “The Adidas family is incredibly proud of Sabastian and Tigist’s historic achievements, marking the fastest times humans have ever run in a marathon. This is a testament to the years of hard work and dedication they have made, alongside our innovation team, who have built a supershoe which breaks new ground in the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3.”

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