Abby Steiner, one of the most decorated American sprinters to come out of the college ranks in years, has filed a lawsuit against Puma and Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix, claiming the carbon-plated spikes and trainers she ran in destroyed her feet and ended her professional career. The case was filed April 24 in Massachusetts Superior Court and was first reported by Front Office Sports.
Steiner is 26. She is a four-time NCAA champion and a two-time world champion, and she turned pro out of the University of Kentucky in July 2022 with a Puma deal widely reported to be worth around $2 million. That kind of money for a women’s sprinter straight out of college was almost unheard of at the time. The same summer she signed, she ran on the U.S. relay teams that swept the 4×100 and 4×400 at the world championships in Eugene.
Then her feet started to fall apart.
According to the suit, Steiner’s foot problems began in 2023 and snowballed from there. She has had at least three procedures since, including double Haglund’s surgery and a repair on her Achilles tendon. She has not raced since the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials, where she finished sixth in the 200 meters and missed the team.
The shoes named in the suit
Steiner’s complaint singles out three Puma models: the Deviate Nitro Elite 2, the Deviate Nitro Elite 3, and the evoSPEED Tokyo Nitro. Her lawyers argue that the carbon fiber plates and nitro foam inside those shoes “changed the foot and ankle mechanics during running” and loaded extra stress onto her feet.
That technology is the entire premise of the modern racing shoe. Ever since Nike rolled out the first Vaporfly, every major brand has been chasing the same recipe of stiff carbon plate plus tall, springy foam, and Puma’s Nitro line is the company’s answer to it. Steiner is now arguing that the same engineering that made her fast also broke her.
The suit also names Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix, the parent of the Mercedes Formula 1 team, because Mercedes’ performance arm helped design the spike. Puma and Mercedes have a long-running tie-up, and the F1 team’s engineers have been pulled into all sorts of non-racing projects, including footwear. The complaint says Puma knew the products were defective, marketed them as safe, and never properly inspected them.
What she is asking for, and why now
Steiner is seeking both financial and non-financial damages, including medical bills, lost career earnings, and what the lawsuit calls “the loss of full enjoyment of life and disfigurement.” That last phrase reads heavy, but in the context of a 26-year-old sprinter whose entire life had been built around going fast in a straight line, it is not hard to see what her lawyers are getting at.
The trickier part of the case is timing. Steiner first got hurt years before suing, and any defense will lean hard on that. Her complaint heads the question off by arguing she “only recently” connected the injuries to the shoes themselves.
“Plaintiff did not know, nor could or should she have reasonably known, that she had been harmed or may have been harmed by Defendants’ conducts,” the lawsuit says, according to Front Office Sports.
Puma and Steiner’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Front Office Sports.
Steiner’s own account of the breakdown
Steiner has been unusually candid with fans about how bad things got. In a long Instagram post in 2024, she described shutting down her season for double Haglund’s surgery, returning to jogging in late November 2023, and then watching the same symptoms creep back into her left foot within a month.
“I was often limping around before & after my practices and getting through on sheer willpower to fulfill a lifelong dream,” she wrote.
She kept training anyway. It was an Olympic year, and Steiner had spent her whole life pointed at exactly that line. By the time outdoor season hit, she was pulling out of tune-up meets because she could not tolerate jogs or walking drills. She still ran rounds at Trials. She went home and could not walk properly around her own house for about two weeks. A third MRI of the season turned up more bone spur and a partial Achilles tear, the kind of overuse injury that ends seasons even for athletes with full medical teams behind them.
“I’m gonna fight like hell to be back,” she wrote. “See you on the track again soon (ish).”
The return never happened. In August 2025, Steiner announced she was “taking a step back from running” to pursue a master’s in exercise science and to give her body the time it had not gotten in five years. The lawsuit, filed eight months later, is what that step back looks like in court.
