Ultra-light Adidas spikes to be worn by Blake, VCB
LONDON, England — Yohan Blake’s chances of winning the sprint double at the Olympic Games has been enhanced, his shoes sponsors say, by a brand new running spikes, — the Adizero Prime — which they say is better than anything previously developed.
Blake and two-time women’s 200m defending champion Veronica Campbell Brown showed off the new and improved running spike during a press conference held yesterday at the Westfield Mall, in Stratford just beside 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’ moniker monogrammed into it while Campbell Brown has her ‘VCB’ initials on her’s.
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 grams 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, was “sixty-two 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 that 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 gram counts. We have calculated that for every 100 gram of weight saved, the athlete’s performance can be improved up to one per cent, often the difference between gold and silver.”
The release also said the Adizero Prime had the involvement of thousands of people, 15 cities, 32 countries and two universities.
