Gallery: Check Out Nike's Crazy New Machine-Designed Track Shoe
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Nike’s Zoom Superfly Elite is one of Nike’s new track shoes for this summer’s Olympics.
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The spike plate is metallic, bluish-purple, and sports an amorphous, latticed spike plate—like a piece of coral mated with a disco ball.
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This shoe can shave a runner’s 100-meter-dash time down by more than a tenth of a second—enough time to turn a fourth-place finisher into a gold medalist.
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It's the result of more than four years of algorithmic software design and 3-D printing prototyping, done in the Nike Sports Research Lab. These are prototypes made and tested in the lab, by Jamaican track star Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
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Created with the help of algorithmic design, the plate is about half the weight—61 grams, down from 118—of the one on the Ja Fly 2, Nike’s last spike. It’s also four times as stiff.
