Adidas 'super trainers' worth £400 sell for £2,000 as first batch sells out within hours

Tigist Assefa wore the Adidas Adizero Adios Pre Evo 1 when she broke the women's world record at the Berlin Marathon. Photo: Adidas < p>Adidas' new «super trainers» worn to erase the marathon world record sold out within hours of their release, sparking auctions that fetched more than £2,000 for a single pair.

Ethiopia's Tigist Assefa bought more than two minutes off the women's world record in shoes during Sunday's Berlin Marathon on Sunday, and as they only went on general sale on Tuesday at £400, the entire stock was quickly snapped up.

This, in turn, prompted online merchants to advertise the product at even more exorbitant prices. One seller has them listed on eBay for a buy it now price of $3,000 (£2,465), while another US trader reportedly bought a pair for £928.

Post on the Adidas website is simple. says, «Out of stock…get it next time» and encourages runners to sign up for the newsletter to find out about future training releases that the running world is talking about.

The Adizero Adios Pro 1 weighs just 138 grams. They are significantly lighter than any comparable previous model and are reinforced with flexible carbon rods inside a foam midsole that measures 39mm in height.

However, according to Runners World, the first 521 pairs also included a disclaimer inside the box , which stated that the ultra-light running shoes are intended for only «one race, that is, one marathon, plus time for familiarization.»

This represents a major new turn in the arms race that has been going on between manufacturers since Nike invented the first «super shoe» in 2016 and then released its best-selling Vaporfly and Alphafly models. The technology is largely similar: Nike also used carbon to hold the shape of its resilient ZoomX foam before Adidas released an unusually lightweight model.

Nike's first running shoes are said to improve running efficiency by about 4%, and all world records over 5000m have been broken in some version of the “super sneaker” or “super spike” since 2020.

Benefit The use of «super running shoes» is widely accepted for all standards of runners, although trials have shown that the extent to which an athlete can benefit from them is very individual.

There is also uncertainty as to whether the new Adiads running shoes will which was used for the first time in a major race just on Sunday — it is significantly more effective than what was already on the market.

All shoe companies now employ huge teams of engineers and scientists, and they are committed to creating faster shoes has become a highly secretive multi-million pound industry.

Dr Thomas Allen, who formerly worked for Adidas and now works at Manchester Metropolitan University's Institute of Sport, told The Telegraph that athletics was now in a new era where high-profile attempts to establish record were developed and timed to coincide with the massive sale of new shoes. “It's becoming much more concrete — we've entered a new era of interaction between engineering companies, marketing and athlete capabilities,” he said.