Nike Spent a Decade Lecturing Customers. Adidas Just Broke the Two-Hour Marathon

On April 26th 2026, in London, a 30 year-old Kenyan called Sabastian Sawe ran a marathon in one hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, the first legal sub-two-hour marathon in history. He was wearing Adidas. So was the runner-up. So was the winner of the women’s race, who broke a world record of her own. The shoe they all wore, the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, sold out in minutes at $500 a pair, with resale prices touching $4,600 within hours. By the end of the week, Adidas shares had climbed on the back of strong earnings, while Nike sat at a 12-year low.

Nike spent its decade lecturing customers. The Colin Kaepernick “Believe in Something” campaign in 2018 set the template. It worked, briefly, and the stock went up. From that point Nike was no longer a footwear company that happened to do clever advertising. It was a brand with a worldview, and that worldview was the standard catechism of corporate progressivism: BLM banners in 2020, the Betsy Ross trainer pulled in 2019 because Kaepernick objected to it, the Dylan Mulvaney sports bra promotion in 2023 that managed to alienate women athletes and conservative parents in the same week. Cannes Lions for the marketing department, ESG gold stars for the boardroom, DEI workshops for everyone else. While the activists applauded, the design studios were going quiet.

Adidas had its own flirtation with the same nonsense after 2020, the same purpose campaigns, the same Pride collections, the same statements about whichever cause was fashionable that month. Then, in 2023, the board brought in Bjørn Gulden as Chief Executive and the experiment ended. Gulden’s pitch was almost embarrassingly old-fashioned: make better products, work with the best athletes, sell more shoes. Journalists kept asking him about the company’s social positioning, its DEI commitments, its plans for the next big values campaign, and his answers were polite, brief and entirely uninterested. He wanted to talk about shoes, athletes and the market in China.

Three years on, Adidas has clawed back its losses, posted double-digit growth, prised US apparel share off Nike and built the fastest marathon shoe ever made. The Adios Pro Evo line has become the most coveted racing shoe on the planet. The latest version weighs 99 grams, about the same as a bar of soap, and Adidas cannot make enough of them. The Vaporfly was a real innovation in 2016 and the Alphafly an iteration in 2020, but Nike’s pipeline has stalled since. Adidas didn’t catch up. It overtook.

Nike is now on the operating table. The board sacked John Donahoe in October 2024 and brought back the 32-year company veteran Elliott Hill to fix what the marketing department broke. Roughly $200 billion of market capitalisation has evaporated since the 2021 peak. Hill has spent more than a million dollars of his own money buying Nike shares, which is generally what executives do when nobody else is volunteering.

This is what happens when ideology displaces competence. The press releases look free because the trade press loves you and the awards keep coming. They are not free. Every hour in a DEI workshop is an hour not spent on product. Every R&D dollar diverted to purpose initiatives is a dollar not spent on foam compounds. Every meeting about brand values is a meeting not held about whether the shoes are any good. The costs are invisible until they aren’t, and then a Kenyan in three stripes runs sub-two-hours and the market notices.

The market is the part that activists, journalists and HR departments cannot argue with. Bud Light cost Anheuser-Busch $1.4 billion in market value in two months when it picked the wrong influencer. Gillette told its male customers they were the problem and watched them walk to the competition. Nike, the most powerful brand in sport, is learning the same lesson in slow motion. Share price is the only honest scoreboard in business. The clock at the marathon finish line is the only honest scoreboard in running. This week they read the same. Nike preached, Adidas designed shoes, and the market rewarded the company that remembered what business it was in.

Lee Taylor is CEO and Founder of marketing agency Uncommon Sense.