Adidas Is Winning the Marathon Super Shoe Arms Race

Nike has been the Chicago Marathon’s official footwear sponsor since 2008, and it came to this year’s race with a super shoe it had unveiled only 11 days before, but on Sunday Adidas won both races. Hawi Feysa defended her title in 2:13:33 and Amos Kipruto won the men’s race in 2:01:09, both in the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, and Tadese Takele finished second to Kipruto in the same shoe, as we laid out in our look at the podium shoes.

It was the second Major in a row in which Adidas took both titles, after Berlin two weeks earlier, where all six runners on the podium wore the Evo 3. With only New York City to come, on Nov. 1, Adidas athletes have won eight of the 12 Major races in 2026, seven of them in the Evo 3, and they hold 20 of the 36 podium places. Nike runners have seven of those places, ASICS runners five, Under Armour two, and On and Xtep one each, going by Sneaker Freaker‘s tally of the season with Chicago added. Across the same seven Majors last year, Adidas won seven of 14.

The Evo 3 Has Taken Over the Front of the Race

Adidas had never made a running shoe under 100 grams before the 97-gram Evo 3, which sells for $500. It went on sale in April, the month Sabastian Sawe wore it to run 1:59:30 in London, with Yomif Kejelcha 11 seconds behind him in the same shoe and Tigst Assefa setting a women-only world record of 2:15:41 in hers that morning. It has been hard to get hold of from the start, and resale listings went above $5,000. Adidas has since put a heavier and much cheaper racer, the $275 Adios Pro 5, on sale, and every Adidas runner on the podiums in Berlin and Chicago still raced in the Evo 3.

Chicago itself has swung in a year. Feysa won here in 2025 in the first Evo, and Kipruto was second in the Evo 2, behind Jacob Kiplimo in Nike’s Alphafly 3, according to our count of last year’s podium shoes. On Sunday Feysa ran 1:23 faster than she did then, and Kipruto finished 30 seconds inside the personal best he set in London in April. Kiplimo ran with him through 30K before a hamstring problem left him fourth.

Bjørn Gulden, the Adidas chief executive, was already saying as much over the summer. “I think it’s fair to say that we are winning in running,” he told analysts on July 30, according to a transcript of the call, and the company’s running business grew by around 30 percent in the second quarter.

Nike Put Its New Shoe on Both Podiums

The Nike Apex, unveiled on Sept. 30, has a full 40mm of stack with no heel-to-toe drop, and packs four Air Zoom units under the ball of the foot. Nike says it returns up to 40 percent more energy than the Alphafly 3. Brigid Kosgei and Milkesa Mengesha both finished third in it on Sunday, Kosgei in 2:14:55 and Mengesha in 2:03:46, a strong first outing for a shoe that nobody can buy until January. Kosgei also won Tokyo in March in the Vaporfly 4, and Kiplimo was third in London in a Nike prototype.

Nike’s running business has been the bright spot in a bad stretch for the company. Elliott Hill, its chief executive, told investors on Oct. 1 that “running is up double digits again with consistent share gains,” according to Benzinga’s transcript, on the same day Nike said its total sales would shrink again this fiscal year.

What a Podium Count Can Tell Us

Any tally of winning shoes is partly a tally of contracts. Sponsored athletes race in their sponsor’s shoes, and Adidas has signed a large share of the best marathoners in the world, Sawe, Kejelcha, Assefa, Kipruto and Feysa among them. Counting podiums can’t separate the shoe from the runner wearing it. It does show that Adidas has built a roster deep enough to fill a Major podium by itself, as it did in Berlin, and that those athletes keep choosing the Evo 3 over the brand’s cheaper racer. Other brands have had their days too: John Korir won Boston in April in an ASICS Metaspeed Sky prototype, and Sharon Lokedi won there in Under Armour’s Velociti Elite 3, as our Boston shoe count showed, before finishing second on Sunday in a development version of it.

The wins are meant to pay off further down the range, in shoes ordinary runners buy. Adidas’ footwear revenue rose only 1 percent in the second quarter as it held back on lifestyle sneakers in a heavily discounted market, and in its July 30 results the company said the “strong credibility for Adizero” was driving demand for the Evo SL, an everyday trainer that costs a fraction of the Evo 3. “The innovation in Performance footwear is paying off,” Gulden said in the same release.

New York City is the last Major of the year. Benson Kipruto won the men’s race there last November in the Evo 2 and Hellen Obiri won the women’s race in On’s Cloudboom Strike LS, and Nike’s Apex will be in shops before the first Major of 2027.