Paris on a plate
Footwear brand Puma has put a lot into helping athletes prepare for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Reigning 400-metres hurdles champion, Karsten Warholm, is one of those hoping the hard work pays off.
In the build-up to his final Olympic Games in Rio in 2016, athletics superstar Usain Bolt said that the only way he could make it look easy to run 100 metres in less than 10 seconds was to put in years of hard work beforehand. “It’s all about getting things right on the day,” he said. He has eight Olympic golds to his name, which means his hard work clearly paid off. He will not compete at Paris 2024 this summer, but he is an inspiration to many.
A fellow Puma-sponsored athlete, Karsten Warholm, said before the most recent summer games in Tokyo that Usain Bolt was someone he had looked up to for many years. “He became bigger than the sport itself,” the Norwegian 400-metres hurdler said, “and that has been amazing for track-and-field.” As his role model was bowing out, Karsten Warholm was, at the age of 20, a semi-finalist in Rio. Five years later (the Tokyo games were delayed by a year because of covid-19, remember), he became an Olympic champion too, winning gold with a new world record time for the 400-metres hurdles of 45.94 seconds.
His preparations for Paris appear to have gone well, culminating in a gold medal at the European Athletics Championships in Rome in June; naturally, lots of hard work on and off the track has preceded this, but he did not have to do all of this work on his own.
Norse inspiration
For his upcoming race at the Stade de France, for which the competition begins on August 5, Warholm will wear special Puma shoes with a thought-provoking Norse-inspired name: evoSpeed Berserker Nitro Elite Spikes. In Norse myth, the Berserkers were warriors who went into battle “in a trance-like fury”. He and his coach, Leif Olav Alnes, may be aiming for control rather than out-and-out fury on the track, but certain aspects of the hurdler’s previous performances chime with the name Berserker.
He goes through an animated routine of slapping himself hard on the shoulders and on the face while bouncing up and down at the starting-blocks. He wore a Viking helmet to celebrate his first World Championship gold medal in London in 2017. And when he won his first Olympic title in Tokyo, he wanted to rip his shirt to salute the stadium crowd and the global television audience with a bare chest, mimicking, according to some scholars, the Berserkers’ armour-disdaining appearance in combat. “It was a bit embarrassing,” the champion said afterwards, “because it took me two goes to rip my top.”
Revolutionary combination
Puma put extensive thought into the evoSpeed Berserker Nitro Elite Spikes. The brand’s vice-president for innovation, Romain Girard, points out that this product combines “the best of Puma’s technologies”. He lists the group’s nitrogen-infused thermoplastic foam Nitrofoam Elite, its Pwrplate carbon fibre plate, which is engineered to stabilise the midsole while maximising energy transfer, and its Ultraweave upper material. “The technologies are combined in a revolutionary way,” Mr Girard tells World Footwear, “allowing a huge improvement in energy return at each step, from the first touchpoint moment to the last millimetre before taking off.”
Working on this project with Puma is part of the programme that the athlete put in place to prepare for Paris and the defence of his Olympic title. He says he enjoys seeing not only the result, which in this case is the Berserker shoe, but also being able to witness all the hard work that has gone into creating the product.
Biomechanically relevant
Milan-based research laboratory Moon Rabbit Adaptive Lab also played a role in developing the new shoe. It used its know-how in computational design to help the brand achieve the revolutionary combination of technologies that Romain Girard refers to. It used data that the Puma innovation team collected from lab-based tests that Warholm took part in. These tests subjected his running and hurdling style to detailed scrutiny and analysis.
Moon Rabbit’s founder, Jesús Marini Parissi, says the company tried to put all aspects together in a virtual environment, including the materials in the shoe construction, the responsiveness of the track and, of course, the athlete’s movements. This allowed the project partners to engineer digital models that made it possible, he claims, to simulate a race environment “in a way that was biomechanically relevant”. Contrary to what many athletics fans might imagine from watching a 400-metres hurdles event, these models show clearly that it is the midfoot that takes all the strain when Karsten Warholm clears a hurdle and springs seamlessly into the next set of strides. This helps explain the shoe’s appearance. It has even less heel than hurdlers’ spikes usually have these days, while it has a distinctive claw-like set of spikes at the tip of the upturned toe to boost rebound.
Mr Parissi, who worked as a freelance design consultant at Puma before founding Moon Rabbit in 2023, admits that it was a thrill to see the Norwegian athlete make a winning start with the new shoes at his recent Rome triumph. “To help him shave off even milliseconds is to help him achieve his goals,” says the computational design engineer.
The one everyone wants to win
All that remains is for Karsten Warholm to repeat the feat at the event everyone wants to win in Paris in August. His view is that coping with the pressure of having rivals from all corners of the world make it their top priority to take your place is an unavoidable part of reaching the top in any sport.
He says he has learned a lot from seeing how hard it is to defend the number-one spot. “You realise that this is not a position that you will have for ever,” he says. “You need to do the right things to maintain it for as long as you can and you need to be willing to take risks. Even if you are the favourite, you have to tackle every race as though you were not.” In race situations, he says he is always on the attack. He also makes the point that winning two Olympic gold medals is better than winning one, a fact that he says no one can deny.
Defending Olympic 400-metres hurdles champion, Karsten Warholm.
All credits: PUMA
