By Amy Tennery, Danielle Kaye and Alessandro Parodi
NEW YORK/PARIS, Oct 30 (Reuters) – Adidas is hoping this weekend’s New York City Marathon will be its chance to run a victory lap, after runners wearing its shoes clocked up eight wins at prized World Marathon Majors this year, boosting sales and outpacing longstanding rival Nike.
Revenue in its Running sector was up 19% in the company’s record-breaking third-quarter earnings, it reported on Thursday.
The wins have come at just the right time for Adidas, with marathoning enjoying a modern golden age of record-breaking participation — from competitive athletes to casual pavement-pounders willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for shoes that they hope will give them an added boost.
The London Marathon, one of seven World Marathon Majors after Sydney was added to the original six in 2025, announced it would split its race into two days to account for the overwhelming interest. New York Road Runners told Reuters it expects record turnout again this year at the NYC Marathon, after drawing roughly a quarter of a million applicants.
“Running as an industry is having a little bit of a heyday,” Patrick Nava, general manager for Adidas Running, told Reuters.
On Sunday, Adidas will be looking to Kenyan Benson Kipruto for its latest win as he defends his NYC Marathon title. He said he was recruited to Adidas shortly after placing second in his debut over the distance in Athens 10 years ago. He has since won major titles including Chicago in 2022 and Tokyo in 2024, as well as taking Olympic bronze in Paris.
“We have signed very good athletes,” Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden told reporters on Thursday. “And to be honest with you, I think we have the best products.”
The repeated high-profile wins give Adidas legitimacy as a brand, said Drake MacFarlane, a research analyst at M Science, adding that the sector was “a core opportunity” for the German firm.
Adidas says its increasing dominance in running kit sales is thanks to a coordinated multiyear effort in a sport that has become ever more competitive.
“Everybody can talk about innovation, but there’s a very simple way in which you measure innovation, which is how much you win,” Nava said.
The brand has over 100 people working in service of running shoe innovation compared to a few dozen some years ago, it said. It also relies on a network of coaches, experts and athletes to recruit signature stars as early as the youth level.
EARLY NIKE DOMINANCE
Nike kicked off the “super shoe” footrace in 2017, with its Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoe that powered Kenyan great and twice Olympic champion Eliud Kipchoge in his early effort at breaking the marathon’s two-hour barrier.
By 2019, Nike was so dominant that athletes and reporters questioned whether Nike-sponsored athletes had an unfair advantage over their competitors. That year, Nike’s men and women won 10 of the 12 golds available at the six World Marathon Majors.
Adidas broke into the pack with its first carbon-infused super shoe in 2020. But its pivotal year came three years later, when it fundamentally reshaped how it develops shoes, prioritizing rapid deployment.
“The average development time for, I’m going to call it a normal running shoe, is anywhere between 18 and 24 months,” said Nava. By comparison, the core work for the brand’s modern elite line “Evo” took nine months.
“When we think we have a good one that’s good enough that we like, then we sort of drop it and we have the athletes use it,” he said. “Right now they’re using the Evo 3. We are already working on a couple of the next iterations. It’s this continuous like, ‘Test, refine, redevelop’, and then ‘Retest, redefine, redevelop’.”
‘A PACE THAT NOBODY HAS SEEN’
Nike said innovations in shoe technology and the increasing popularity of marathoning have led to a more competitive sector.
“There’s more investment in this area and, you know, just the cost of even competing in this space continues to rise,” Tanya Hvizdak, vice president and general manager for global running at Nike, told Reuters.
Earlier this month, Nike said it was deepening a restructuring, announcing a plan to cut more jobs and shake up its global business divisions after forecasting a steep drop in full-year revenue.
But Nike’s Running business sector has remained one of the areas where it is still seeing growth, despite its relatively lackluster marathon results. The unit has reported six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and Nike says its share of the max-cushioning category nearly tripled over the past year.
Strong showings at the Chicago Marathon, where its athletes accounted for six of the top 10 men’s finishes and three of the top five women’s, were bright spots for the year.
“You’re going to see us innovating at a pace that nobody has seen in prior years,” said Hvizdak. “And that’s going to be something that’s going to be unrelenting that we’re pretty excited about. And our athletes are leading that for us.”
Smaller brands like On, Asics and Under Armour are also competing for a spot on the podium.
But one of the challenges for running is that — unlike sports such as soccer, where a household name is enough to move a product — selling marathon shoes requires wins, said Nava.
“You don’t have necessarily the superstars like you have in football,” he said.
“You know, you put something on a (Lionel) Messi or on a Lamine Yamal, that will have immediate impact, right? Running is a little bit different in the sense you need that to be credible because you can say like, ‘Hey, I actually objectively say that we have some of the best shoes in the industry’.”
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New York, Danielle Kaye in New York and Alessandro Parodi in Paris; additional reporting by Helen Reid in London, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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