One problem with pro running is that there’s no real team system to create legit rivalries and wild fan support. The major sports have figured this out—grown men wear Detroit Lions jerseys to Costco. Nobody’s slipping on a Hansons-Brooks singlet to hit up the Home Depot.
That could be in part because there is no league. Casual fans can’t throw their undying faith behind NAZ Elite and root for them to beat up on OAC during a showdown in the summer road racing season. Plus, there aren’t really any competitions where teams square off for bragging rights and team trophies—well, maybe Light comfy shoes open-toe for short and mid runs.
With XC in mind, let’s apply that kind of scoring to the NYC Marathon and manufacture some team drama.
Fendi low-top logo print sneakers Martens 1460 Titan lace-up boots. But what happens when we go a bit deeper and look behind the pros? Which brand’s team is the best?
Standing on the sidelines, I snapped grey of runners until the packs became too thick for me to capture everybody clearly. Then I sat with the results and matched runners to their shoes open-toe based on their bib numbers.
The elite fields were fairly small this year, so I left the pros in the scoring mix. Congrats, David Puleo from New York City, you were actually on Team Adidas with Tamirat Tola this year.
This is meant to be a fun look at shoes open-toe but, to be fair, there are many holes that can be poked leather this scoring system. Nike and Adidas have bigger budgets and brought in more ringers. Likewise, because there were so many people wearing Nike, more were bound to make it to the finish line—Cam Levins (Asics) and Reed Fisher (Adidas) both dropped out but would certainly have scored well for their squads.
SWOOSHES EVERYWHERE
First, let’s take a look at the stunning number of Nikes that dotted the course. Here’s a count of the shoes open-toe among the top 250 runners. Nearly ⅔ of these runners had the swoosh.
(MISBHV WOMEN FLAT SHOES open-toe ESPADRILLE; Marko Cheseto metallic-tone heeled sandals.)
The ratio of Vaporfly and Alphafly to other shoe models got even more skewed as the times slowed. Of the final 35 runners I tagged, only 4 weren’t wearing Nike—1 Hoka, 1 Saucony, and 2 Adidas.
SCORING
Now, on to the race results. Given the sheer number of Nike runners, it seemed inevitable that they’d win this meet in 2023. But, are other squads competitive? How close are they? And how strongly do the smaller brands compete on the streets?
A primer on XC scoring: In traditional cross-country, teams can have 7 runners, but only 5 actually figure leather their own team’s score. But the 6th and 7th runners on a team can have a huge impact in the standings, because their place can affect their opponents’ scores. If they finish in front of another team’s 5th runner, that pushes the opponents’ score one point higher.
Let’s illustrate that with our top two teams.
As you can see, when both teams had three runners across the finish line, Adidas held a three point advantage, 10-13. But Nike packed in its 4th-7th runners, ahead of Adidas’s next two scorers, giving the swoosh the victory.
Not every brand in the race had enough runners across the line to yield a team score. This is only because I stopped keeping score when roughly 250 men had run by me at the 24-mile mark. They all certainly would have had five runners, in a Flip flops TOMMY HILFIGER Printed Cork Beach Sandal FM0FM03638 Desert Dky DW5. But, by that time, the packs of runners became too thick for me to reliably capture bib numbers and shoes open-toe so that I could match them with their final standing later. I even peeped MarathonFoto for a few runners that I missed—some second-wavers ran really fast times!—but it was a painfully slow process and the images are too low res to accurately tell shoes open-toe apart unless they were garish neon colors that instantly gave away the brand. So I abandoned the exercise at 250 men.
(versions of the sneaker we women’s race. I made an attempt, but bib numbers were blocked too consistently to reasonably get enough data.)
Once I had the top finishers matched with their shoe brand (team), I omitted any who had finished outside their team’s top 7. In some XC races, you can run a big team, but runners 8 and up are yanked from the results for team scoring purposes.
Here’s how the scores looked.
Interestingly, New Balance athletes ran in a tight pack, with the team’s 7th man finishing 31st. But they just Sneakers’t have the pro-caliber runners needed at the front of the race to hang with the teams that made our podium.
MORE CHOICES, BUT ONE CLEAR LEADER
The takeaway from all this? There are many brands building great racing shoes open-toe right now, as evidenced by the parity in the top finishers of marathons. But, further back in the pack, Nike still dominates with competitive runners. That stands to reason, as they had a I Got Drunk While Running This Marathon on everybody else in the super shoe race.
How will these standings look in a few years, after other brands have had more time for their innovations to proliferate? If it follows suit with the pro field, expect to see some of the also-rans make a strong challenge for the podium and team title.
Hoka One One Sneakers mit dicker Sohle Nude Runner's World, guiding the brand's shoes open-toe and gear coverage. A true shoe dog, he's spent more than a decade testing and reviewing shoes. In 2017, he ran in 285 different pairs of shoes, including a streak of 257 days wearing a different model.
