Running has been hijacked by an arms race fuelled by billions. Has the sport lost its purity forever?

Australian distance-running great Chris Wardlaw has made an impassioned plea for World Athletics to tighten its restrictions on "super shoes" in the wake of Sabastian Sawe's historic sub-two-hour marathon, arguing the technology "distorts what the true meaning of the sport should be".

Wardlaw – who contested the marathon at both the 1976 and 1980 Olympics, and was the head coach of the Australian athletics team at Sydney 2000 – also called for national and world records to be split into pre-super shoes and post-super shoes categories.

The latest mind-boggling chapter in the super shoe era's "dramatic disruption of the sport", as Wardlaw put it, saw Kenya's Sawe become the first human in history to officially run a marathon in less than two hours.

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In the same race, the iconic London Marathon, Ethiopia's Yomif Kejelcha also shattered the two-hour barrier.

Sawe and Kejelcha, who clocked 1:59:30 and 1:59:41 respectively, are both Adidas athletes, and both ran the marathon in the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. It's the German giant's latest and greatest production in its mission – and it's proving successful – to trounce the likes of Nike, ASICS, On, Puma and Hoka in the multibillion-dollar super shoes arms race.

The Pro Evo 3 shoes boast "carbon-infused energy rods" and Adidas' "lightest and most responsive foam to date", the company's official website notes. Compared to the Pro Evo 3's predecessor, Adidas claims, the rods and foam deliver greater energy return by 11 per cent and improve running economy by 1.6 per cent. In a nutshell, the foam propels a runner forward with a trampoline-like effect and the carbon provides stability.

The super shoes era exploded with the release of the Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% in 2017. Super shoes have had such an enormous impact on results in distance running since then, especially marathon running, that Wardlaw likes to joke pre-2017 was BC and post-2017 is AD.

"I don't want to be seen as a dinosaur creeping out of my grave screaming at people," Wardlaw says, prefacing his arguments against super shoes in an interview with Wide World of Sports.

"It's all philosophical, and I think the marathon is important."

Distance running, Wardlaw says, is "fundamentally a competition with gravity".

"And why the marathon has become a bit of a metaphor for life is it's very, very difficult to run 26 miles – period – let alone run it fast," he says.

"And all the training over many, many years ... it's always been this fundamental competition with gravity. How can you train yourself so that you can get to 26 miles, 385 yards in one piece, and train yourself to even run home hard? [Australian marathon legend] Robert de Castella won his world championship [in Helsinki in 1983] by really running brutally fast over the last five to six kilometres, and that training was always against gravity.

"Now what's happened with the technology is that it's actually said, 'Oh, well what about gravity? It's not so important. Let's make it very springy and let's defeat gravity'. And they have to some extent, and all power to the shoe companies. They've done it. But to me, it distorts what the true meaning of the sport should be.

"I don't think we really know what could have been achieved without these shoes – with training, great races, important events.

"Anybody who knows maths would say there's been a jump here that has to be explained more by technology than human endeavour."

Many have drawn comparisons between super shoes in athletics and super suits in swimming.

In 2009 alone, 147 world records were broken by swimmers wearing super suits. Forty-three of those world records fell in Rome at the world championships.

The global governing body of swimming cracked down, banning the polyurethane suits from January 1, 2010.

"Swimming said, 'No, this is actually changing the nature of the sport. It's a flotation device that defeats the purpose of swimming and the training'," Wardlaw says.

"So they banned them.

"People would say, 'Well, we can't go back now because we've unleashed it'. I'm not so sure about that.

"I think we should be trying to regulate super shoes as much as possible.

"It's interesting swimming made that choice but we didn't. And for an obvious reason: it's the shoe companies – they're big business."

World Athletics mandates that road shoes must have a maximum thickness of 40 millimetres and have no more than one rigid structure.

In track events, shoes cannot have a stack height greater than 20mm. Previously, a 25mm stack height was allowed, and before that, 30mm.

Adidas' Pro Evo 3 has a stack height of 39mm.

"My view is once we've got data – and there's masses of data – I would have thought there's room to think seriously about the regulations," Wardlaw adds.

"World Athletics I think at the elite end should have made some more conscious decisions.

"As I say, I still think it's not too late now to freeze it a little bit.

"World Athletics should be consciously being more deliberate about what we think is legitimate in the sport. Otherwise, we'll be on springs! We've seen all the memes of people on pogo sticks.

"The legacy question is a big, big issue for the sport. There are asterisks everywhere. There's no question about the technology."

Asked if he'd like to see national and world records divided into pre-super shoes and post-super shoes categories, Wardlaw is unequivocal.

"I would love that," he says.

"I think we need to acknowledge in the lists a very, very clear distinction. That's why I joke about BC and AD and 2017. I would like a notation.

"We need to ask, and the data tells us, 'When were the all-time lists in Australia and the world remarkably transformed?'"

Many supporters of the super shoe boom point out the transition from cinder and grass tracks to spongy synthetic tracks across the 1960s and '70s, and the avalanche of world records that fell in that era. They argue the emergence of super shoes should be seen in the same light.

Wardlaw disagrees.

"All the other technological benefits have not been as profound," the Victorian says.

Wardlaw's personal best in the marathon was 2:11:55, set in Japan's Fukuoka Marathon in 1979.

He ran the 1976 Olympic marathon in Montreal in Nike Oregon Waffles – a lairy pair of green and gold "racing flats".

In past eras, the likes of Adidas and Nike claimed their shoes made people run faster, but the claims were mere marketing. Nowadays, given the advent of carbon-fire plates, "energy rods", "air zoom units" and huge chunks of springy foam, the performance-enhancing claims are undisputedly true.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe was probed about the game-changing technology on his visit to Botswana for the world athletics relays last weekend.

"I don't think any society, any civilisation, any sector of the economy has been served well if you try to strangle innovation," Coe told the BBC.

"The role of World Athletics is very clear: we want to enable, but we also have a regulatory responsibility."

Wardlaw, who was the coach of Australian marathon legend Steve Moneghetti, admits super shoes have in some ways had a positive impact on the sport. He points out the billions of dollars the super shoe boom has pumped into the sport, resulting in contracts and prize money for athletes that previously were the stuff of fantasy. He also agrees super shoes have made it easier for the average Joe or Joanne to run long distances, turbocharging the sport's popularity at the recreational level.

And he agrees the record-tumbling times are not only down to super shoes, but advances in fuelling, training and coaching.

But the seismic impact of super shoes on the times being run does not sit well with him.

"If we had have kept the same shoes, what would the world record be?" Wardlaw wonders.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it was 2:01, considering what [Ethiopian icon] Haile Gebrselassie ran [when he clocked 2:03:59 in the 2008 Berlin Marathon]. And maybe in great conditions – a little bit of a tailwind, good competition – the two-hour barrier could have been broken. But I would prefer to know it was for that reason and not the shoes.

"I just want to make sure that the legacy is respected and that we ask really important questions about what the end point is."