Influence of shoe and athlete on 100 m sprint acceleration biomechanics

Abstract

With record-breaking performance recently seen in track and field running events and associated with advanced footwear, also sprint spikes are increasingly researched. Current sprint spikes combine multiple features, e.g. lightweight, compliant and resilient foams, tensile bags and high longitudinal bending stiffness (LBS) (Healey et al., 2022). Teasing out performance benefits of sprint spikes, however, remains challenging due to the race task being maximum effort of an individual athlete. It is recommended to research performance of sprint spikes by single-subject analysis given the variation in biomechanical variables among elite sprinters (Bezodis et al., 2014).