LONDON, England — Yohan Blake's chances of winning the sprint double at the Olympic Games has been enhanced by a brand new running spikes, the Adizero Prime, which Adidas, his shoe sponsor, says is better than anything they had previously developed.

Blake and two-time women's 200m defending champion Veronica Campbell Brown showed off the new and improved running spikes during a press conference held yesterday at the Westfield Mall, in Stratford just beside the Olympic Park.

Blake, the IAAF World champion in the 100m and national double sprint champion hailed the running shoe as "one of the best spikes ever made", and said "when I have them on they are so light I can't feel them, it is like my feet are on the ground."

The pair that Blake will wear are personalised with

his 'The Beast' nickname monogrammed into it, while Campbell Brown has her 'VCB' initials on hers.

A number of other Jamaican athletes will also wear the Adidas brand throughout the Games.

Andrew Barr, product manager, business unit running for the German sporting goods company told the press conference that each spike weighed a mere "99 grammes or just 3.5 ounces, half the weight of the box it is in".

Barr said the shoes which took nearly three years, 34 months in the research and development stages, was "62 per cent lighter than the Adidas shoes that the athletes wore in Beijing, at the last Olympic Games".

A release from the brand said: "It was decided for the shoes to be called Adizero, they had to be the lightest-in-class and share certain lightweight construction techniques such as sprintweb, sprintskin and recently sprintframe."

The release quoted Udi Muelle, head of technical marketing innovation at Adidas as saying: "In the Olympic Games, every tenth of a second and every gramme counts. We have calculated that for every 100g of weight saved, the athlete's performance can be improved up to one per cent often the difference between gold and silver."