IAAF getting complaints about Vaporfly?

[tandfman]

For me, that is the point. At what point are springs on the inside of shoes going to be regarded as legal?

A related question is whatever you decide, how are you going to enforce it. How can officials decide whether a shoe is legal without cutting it open? X-ray it? Not very practical.

[Atticus]

Atticus I think you should get out more....

Sigh . . . I was just remarking on how much has changed . . .

[jazzcyclist]

A related question is whatever you decide, how are you going to enforce it. How can officials decide whether a shoe is legal without cutting it open? X-ray it? Not very practical.

Baseball, bike racing and auto racing have years of experience checking for illegal equipment.

[measurer]

Baseball, bike racing and auto racing have years of experience checking for illegal equipment.

It would be virtual impossible to do this in the road racing environment especially in mass races with age group awards. We would need to something along the lines of the head phone ban. You might be able to do this with a handful of elite runners but it would be challenging.

[18.99s]

It would be virtual impossible to do this in the road racing environment especially in mass races with age group awards. We would need to something along the lines of the head phone ban. You might be able to do this with a handful of elite runners but it would be challenging.

They can't drug test everybody either. The inability to enforce a rule on everybody hasn't and shouldn't stop them from making a rule and enforcing it on the elite athletes.

[18.99s]

The NBA requires shoes to be pre-approved by the league before being used in games. They banned this particular shoe in 2009, which reportedly increased vertical leap by 3 inches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNr97V19hcY

[tandfman]

That video reinforces the point that I made yesterday. Assuming that the shoe isn't branded or marked in a way that calls attention to the advantage, how are officials to determine whether it's legal? Cutting it open (as the guy did in the vid) destroys the shoe. An x-ray might detect the illegality, but setting up a drug-testing station seems easy and cheap compared to setting up an effective x-ray system.

[18.99s]

Collecting a sample for drug testing may cheap, but the actual tests are expensive. X-rays are cheaper and quicker than drug tests, and once a noncompliant shoe has already been identified and banned, it would often subsequently be recognized by external inspection.

[Conor Dary]

Sigh . . . I was just remarking on how much has changed . . .

Oh dear...

[tandfman]

Collecting a sample for drug testing may cheap, but the actual tests are expensive. X-rays are cheaper and quicker than drug tests, and once a noncompliant shoe has already been identified and banned, it would often subsequently be recognized by external inspection.

Yes, but the drug testing can be done by one or two labs on a country as big as the US. You wouldn't have to load the cost of setting up and maintaining a lab on each meet or race. The x-ray, however, would have to be on-site.