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November 7, 2026

Findivoza

Business & Money

Adidas heads to New York chasing a victory lap in the marathon shoe wars

Faizan Altaf

Adidas arrived at the New York City Marathon weekend with something it has not had for years: the upper hand. After a season in which runners wearing its shoes won eight of the twelve World Marathon Majors races held so far in 2026, the German brand was hoping the final major of the year would complete a victory lap.

The race, the last of the seven World Marathon Majors in 2026, was due to be run on Sunday, 1 November. Adidas was looking to Kenya’s Benson Kipruto, the defending champion, for its latest win. Kipruto won in New York in 2025, and a successful defence would have capped a year in which Adidas athletes have dominated the front of the world’s biggest marathons — and turned elite results into sales, in a sport where victories are the advertising.

At a glance

What happened: Adidas athletes won eight of the twelve World Marathon Majors races held in 2026 before New York, and the brand’s Running revenue rose 19% in a record third quarter.

Why it matters: The wins have helped Adidas overtake Nike at the front of elite marathoning, turning a technology race into a sales race at a time when marathon participation is booming.

What happens next: Benson Kipruto was due to defend his New York City Marathon title on 1 November, in the final major of the year, with Adidas hoping for a ninth win.

A record quarter built on running

Adidas reported its third-quarter results on Thursday, 29 October. Revenue rose 9% to 7.25 billion euros, or 7% on a currency-neutral basis, and operating profit climbed 37% to 1.01 billion euros — the highest quarterly revenue and operating profit in the company’s history, according to its chief executive, Bjorn Gulden.

Running was one of the strongest parts of that performance. Revenue in the Running sector was up 19%, Adidas reported, and the company’s Performance division, which includes running, training and football, grew 14% on a currency-neutral basis. Direct-to-consumer sales, through Adidas’s own shops and website, grew 17% globally.

The wider quarter was driven even more by clothing than by shoes. Apparel revenue rose 19% on a currency-neutral basis, led by its Originals and football collections, while footwear revenue was flat overall, although footwear sales through direct channels grew 6%. Europe was the one weak spot, with revenue down 4%, while every other market grew at double-digit rates.

Adidas also raised its outlook for the full year. It now expects currency-neutral sales to grow by 9% to 10% in 2026, and operating profit of around 2.5 billion euros, up from previous guidance of 2.3 billion euros. Net income in the third quarter rose 48% to 711 million euros.

Eight wins out of twelve

Before New York, Adidas athletes had won eight of the twelve World Marathon Majors races in 2026, and held 20 of the 36 podium places, according to a tally published after the Chicago Marathon in October. Nike runners held seven podium places, Asics five, Under Armour two, and On and Xtep one each.

The most emphatic statement came in Berlin in late September. All six runners on the Berlin Marathon podium raced in the same shoe, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. Guye Adola won the men’s race in a personal best of 2:02:50, while Tigst Assefa won the women’s race in a course record of 2:11:04, the third-fastest women’s marathon ever run.

It was the first time since 2017, when Nike swept the men’s and women’s podiums at the Boston Marathon, that one manufacturer had claimed all six places at a World Marathon Major. Assefa’s pair was a development version of the Evo 3 rather than the shoe Adidas sells in shops, but the other five podium finishers wore the retail shoe, which sells for 500 dollars and weighs about 97 grams.

Chicago, two weeks later, underlined the point. At a race Nike has sponsored since 2008, Adidas won both titles: Amos Kipruto took the men’s race in 2:01:09 and Hawi Feysa defended her women’s title in 2:13:33, both in the Evo 3. London, in April, had produced the season’s most famous result: Sabastian Sawe won in 1:59:30, becoming the first person to run an official marathon in under two hours, with Yomif Kejelcha just 11 seconds behind him. Assefa won the women’s race in London in a women’s-only world record. Both were wearing the Evo 3.

“We have signed very good athletes,” Gulden told reporters on Thursday. “And to be honest with you, I think we have the best products.”

How Adidas caught up

Adidas’s dominance is recent, and it was built deliberately. For most of the super-shoe era, Nike set the pace. Nike kicked off the race in 2017 with its Zoom Vaporfly Elite, the shoe that powered Kenyan great Eliud Kipchoge in his early attempt at breaking the marathon’s two-hour barrier. By 2019, Nike was so dominant that athletes and reporters questioned whether its sponsored athletes had an unfair advantage: that year, Nike’s men and women won 10 of the 12 gold medals available at the six World Marathon Majors.

Adidas broke into the pack with its first carbon-infused super shoe in 2020. But its pivotal year came in 2023, when it fundamentally reshaped how it develops shoes, prioritising rapid deployment over long development cycles.

“The average development time for, I’m going to call it a normal running shoe, is anywhere between 18 and 24 months,” Patrick Nava, general manager for Adidas Running, told Reuters. By comparison, the core work for the brand’s modern elite line, the Evo, took nine months.

“When we think we have a good one that’s good enough that we like, then we sort of drop it and we have the athletes use it,” Nava said. “Right now they’re using the Evo 3. We are already working on a couple of the next iterations. It’s this continuous like, ‘Test, refine, redevelop’, and then ‘Retest, redefine, redevelop’.”

Adidas says it now has more than 100 people working on running shoe innovation, compared with a few dozen some years ago. It also relies on a network of coaches, experts and athletes to recruit signature stars as early as the youth level — a pipeline that brought Kipruto to the brand shortly after he finished second in his marathon debut in Athens ten years ago.

Kipruto has since won major titles including Chicago in 2022 and Tokyo in 2024, as well as taking Olympic bronze in Paris. The repeated high-profile wins give Adidas legitimacy as a brand, said Drake MacFarlane, a research analyst at M Science, adding that the sector was “a core opportunity” for the German firm.

Why winning matters more in running than in football

Running is a peculiar market for a sportswear brand. In football, a famous name can sell a shirt on its own. In running, the product has to prove itself on the clock — and the proof has to keep coming.

“You don’t have necessarily the superstars like you have in football,” Nava told Reuters. “You know, you put something on a [Lionel] Messi or on a Lamine Yamal, that will have immediate impact, right? Running is a little bit different in the sense you need that to be credible because you can say like, ‘Hey, I actually objectively say that we have some of the best shoes in the industry’.”

That logic cuts both ways. A tally of winning shoes is partly a tally of contracts: sponsored athletes race in their sponsor’s shoes, and Adidas has signed a large share of the best marathoners in the world. Counting podiums cannot separate the shoe from the runner wearing it. What it does show is that Adidas has built a roster deep enough to fill a major podium by itself, as it did in Berlin, and that those athletes keep choosing the Evo 3 over the brand’s cheaper racer, the 275-dollar Adios Pro 5, which went on sale in September.

The commercial prize is a mass market that has grown far beyond elite athletes. “Running as an industry is having a little bit of a heyday,” Nava said.

The London Marathon, one of seven World Marathon Majors after Sydney was added to the original six in 2025, announced it would split its race into two days. The 2027 race will take place across Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April 2027, allowing a record 100,000 runners to take part, after more than 1.3 million people entered the ballot for the 2026 race. Organisers say the two-day event could raise more than 150 million pounds for charity.

New York Road Runners told Reuters it expects record turnout again this year, after drawing roughly a quarter of a million applicants.

Nike’s answer: restructure and run faster

Nike, the brand Adidas has overtaken at the front of the marathon, has not stood still — but its wider business is under far more pressure. Earlier in October, Nike said it was deepening a restructuring, with a plan to cut more jobs and shake up its global business divisions after forecasting a steep drop in full-year revenue.

The plan, called Pace, reorganises Nike into three geographic regions instead of four, and is expected to deliver about 2.5 billion dollars in savings through fiscal 2031. Nike has not said how many roles will be cut, and said it would begin notifying employees in 2027. For fiscal 2027, Nike expects revenue to decline by a high single-digit percentage, weaker than analysts had forecast.

Nike said innovations in shoe technology and the increasing popularity of marathoning have led to a more competitive sector. “There’s more investment in this area and, you know, just the cost of even competing in this space continues to rise,” Tanya Hvizdak, vice president and general manager for global running at Nike, told Reuters.

But Nike’s Running business has remained one of the areas where it is still seeing growth, despite its relatively lacklustre marathon results. The unit has reported six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, according to Nike, and its athletes accounted for six of the top ten men’s finishes and three of the top five women’s finishes at the Chicago Marathon.

“You’re going to see us innovating at a pace that nobody has seen in prior years,” Hvizdak said. “And that’s going to be something that’s going to be unrelenting that we’re pretty excited about. And our athletes are leading that for us.”

Smaller brands are also competing for a place on the podium, including On, Asics and Under Armour. At Chicago, Kenya’s Sharon Lokedi finished second in the women’s race wearing the Under Armour Velocity Elite 3.

What New York was set to decide

The New York City Marathon is the final World Marathon Major of the year, and it was the last chance in 2026 for the shoe brands to make their case on the biggest stage in American running. A win for Kipruto would have given Adidas nine of the thirteen major titles in 2026 — a commanding end to a season in which it had already swept Berlin and taken both titles in London and Chicago. A win for a Nike or Asics athlete, by contrast, would have been a reminder that the race is far from settled.

Either way, the broader contest is now about who can keep innovating fastest. Adidas has shortened its development cycle to nine months for its elite line and is already working on the next versions of the Evo. Nike has promised innovation at a pace nobody has seen before. For Adidas, the numbers already tell a good story: record revenue, record profit, running sales up by nearly a fifth, and a podium record that no rival could match in 2026. New York was the chance to put a finishing line under it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the marathon shoe war?

It is the competition between sportswear brands — led by Adidas and Nike — to build the fastest marathon racing shoes, using carbon plates and lightweight foams. Elite results act as proof of the technology, and brands use wins at the World Marathon Majors to sell shoes to everyday runners.

How many World Marathon Majors did Adidas win in 2026?

Adidas athletes won eight of the twelve World Marathon Majors races held in 2026 before New York, and held 20 of the 36 podium places, including both titles in London, Berlin and Chicago. New York, on 1 November, was the final major of the year.

How much did Adidas’s Running revenue grow?

Revenue in Adidas’s Running sector was up 19% in the third quarter of 2026, the company reported on 29 October. Overall revenue rose 9% to 7.25 billion euros in the quarter, and operating profit climbed 37% to 1.01 billion euros.

Who is Benson Kipruto?

Benson Kipruto is a Kenyan marathon runner sponsored by Adidas. He was due to defend his New York title on 1 November 2026, having won in 2025. His other major titles include Chicago in 2022 and Tokyo in 2024, and he took Olympic bronze in Paris.

What is the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3?

It is Adidas’s elite marathon racing shoe, launched in April 2026. It weighs about 97 grams and sells for 500 dollars. All six podium finishers at the 2026 Berlin Marathon wore it, although Tigst Assefa’s pair was a development version.

Why is Nike struggling if its Running business is growing?

Nike’s Running unit has reported six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, but the wider company is under pressure. In October 2026 Nike announced a restructuring plan called Pace, with more job cuts and a forecast that full-year revenue would fall by a high single-digit percentage in fiscal 2027.

Why is the London Marathon becoming a two-day event?

The 2027 London Marathon will be staged across 24 and 25 April 2027, allowing a record 100,000 runners to take part after more than 1.3 million people entered the ballot for the 2026 race. Organisers describe it as a one-off expansion and say it could raise more than 150 million pounds for charity.

Conclusion

Adidas went into the New York City Marathon weekend ahead of Nike where it matters most, at the front of the world’s biggest races, and ahead in the sales figures too. Eight wins from twelve majors, a Berlin podium swept by a single shoe, and a record quarter with Running revenue up 19% tell the same story from different angles.

The season’s final race was due to decide whether that story ended with a ninth win. But whatever happened on the streets of New York, the shape of the contest has already changed. Adidas proved that a faster development cycle, a deeper roster of athletes and a lighter, faster shoe could overturn almost a decade of Nike dominance in the super-shoe era. Nike’s answer is a restructuring and a promise to innovate faster than ever before.

Sources

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.

Faizan Altaf

Faizan Altaf is the founder and author of findivoza.com, a news blog covering world, Pakistan, business, technology, health and sport in plain English. He writes for general readers who want clear, trustworthy news without jargon. His work focuses on explaining what happened, why it matters, and what to watch next.

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