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Let’s Talk Fabric
By flattening out the fibres within their garments and adding Titanium Dioxide*, the natural element, Under Armour has released a garment within Train and Run which quickly pulls heat away from the skin – allowing the human body to continue for an extended period, at maximum capacity. The specially designed fibres lay flat against your skin to evenly disperse heat, literally providing a cooling sensation to the touch.
Optimum Performance
As top competitors will know, it can take a minute variant to give you a competitive edge, to create the podium finish, to define who wins and who comes in second. Under Armour added Titanium Dioxide to its ISO-CHILLCollection to absorb UV energy and quickly move heat away from the body. The exclusion of this concentrated heat allows the athlete to increase the max-out time and increase output in any hot, high pressure situation.
Garments are available in both the run and train category in Under Armour Brand House stores nationwide as well as online at www.underarmour.co.za
Global sports brand PUMA has signed 22-year-old US-American track and field athlete Abby Steiner. The rising star’s victory in the women’s 200-metre final of the US Outdoor Championships in 21.77 seconds made her the second-fastest woman in the world over this distance up till that point in 2022, and this week she made it through to the 200m final at the World Athletic Championships in Eugene, going on to finish fifth with a time of 22.26 in her first appearance in a world final.
Steiner currently boasts impressive personal bests of 10.90 for 100m and that 21.77 for 200m, and she holds both the women’s indoor 200m American record with a time of 22.09, as well as the collegiate-level NCAA 200m record (outdoors) at 21.80, which she set at the NCAA Championships in June this year.
In 2018, Steiner was named her nation’s best high school female athlete, having excelled both in athletics and soccer. That year she began studying at the University of Kentucky (UK) on a dual-sport scholarship, but after tearing her knee ligaments on the soccer field, she decided to focus on the track, and Steiner cites this decision as a key to her track development: “Before, with soccer, I’d be training soccer in the fall, then I would come to track. I think really allowing myself to dive fully into the process of the periodisation of training that we do, so fall training and then going into indoor and outdoor seasons, it’s all really important in developing speed and getting to where you want to be.”
Eyes on the Prize
Since focusing solely on the track, Steiner has quickly developed into a world-class athlete. She won the 2021 NCAA Division 1 Indoor Championship 200m title with a meeting record 22.38. Then in 2022, she completed a full sweep of medals at the next installment of the NCAA Indoor Champs, taking gold in the 200m (with a meeting record 22.16), silver in the 60m (with a PB 7.10), and bronze in 4x400m relay.
Next up was the 2022 NCAA Division 1 Outdoor Champs, where she won gold in the 200m and set that 21.80 NCAA record, added a bronze medal in the 100m with her 10.90 PB, and helped her UK varsity team win the 4x400m relay (in another meeting record 3:22.55). Steiner followed that with her title-winning 200m run at the US Champs, with yet another PB.
Earlier this year, Steiner was named the National Women’s Track Athlete of the Year and the 2022 Honda Sport Award winner for Track & Field, presented annually to the most outstanding women’s college athlete in each of 12 NCAA Division 1 women’s sports. Therefore, PUMA is thrilled to announce that she has signed to run in the company’s shoes and apparel. “Abby Steiner is one of the most exciting upcoming stars in Track and Field,” said Pascal Rolling, Head of Running Sports Marketing at PUMA. “We believe that she will have a brilliant career, and we want to be by her side and support her.”
Ready to Fly Faster
Steiner graduated with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science in May 2022, and has been accepted to the UK’s physical therapy programme, but has decided to defer her enrolment in order to concentrate on her professional track career, and she is understandably happy to land a lucrative sponsorship deal with a sport brand so prominent and involved in track and field. “PUMA’s list of high-performance athletes is impressive and being one of them just feels amazing,” says Steiner. “I am very happy to be part of the PUMA family now, and I can’t wait to take off.”
More About PUMA
PUMA is one of the world’s leading sports brands, designing, developing, selling and marketing footwear, apparel and accessories. For more than 70 years, PUMA has relentlessly pushed sport and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. PUMA offers performance and sport-inspired lifestyle products in categories such as Football, Running and Training, Basketball, Golf, and Motorsports. It collaborates with renowned designers and brands to bring sport influences into street culture and fashion. The PUMA Group owns the brands PUMA, Cobra Golf and stichd. The company distributes its products in more than 120 countries, employs about 16,000 people worldwide, and is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
Global sports brand PUMA has signed five-time Olympic Champion and fastest woman alive, Elaine Thompson-Herah. The 30-year-old Jamaican will further boost the company’s impressive roster of track and field athletes at the 2022 World Athletics Championships, currently underway in Eugene, Oregon, in the USA.
Last year Thompson-Herah became the first woman in history to win the “sprint double” at consecutive Olympics, having taken gold in both the 100-metre and 200-metre sprints at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and then doing it again at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Apart from her historic Olympic achievements, Thompson-Herah became the fastest woman alive when she ran 10.54 seconds at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene in 2021. That is the closest any woman has yet come to beating the long-standing (but disputed) World Record 10.49 Set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988.
“We are thrilled that Elaine has chosen to join the PUMA family,” says PUMA CEO Bjørn Gulden. “With her speed, she embodies everything we stand for as a brand. Elaine ran the second-fastest time in women’s history last year and is only 0.05 seconds off a World Record. She is really targeting that World Record, and we want to help her achieve that goal with our most innovative performance products.”
PUMA has a long and rich history in track & field, and has sponsored the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association since 2002. Thompson-Herah now joins her Jamaican compatriot, sprint superhero, World Record-holder and multiple Olympic gold medallist Usain Bolt as part of the PUMA family. “PUMA just felt like the right fit, a company that has been working with the World’s Fastest Man for decades,” says Thompson-Herah. “I’m excited to be part of such an elite group, and I really want to break the 100-metre World Record. The current one has been undefeated for 34 years. Now is the time. I think there’s still a lot I can unleash.”
Ed’s Note: At the time of writing, Elaine Thompson-Herah had finished third in the women’s 100m final at the 2022 World Champs, the third-placed Jamaican in another cleansweep of the sprint podium by her country on the world stage. She had also cruised through the first round of qualifying heats in the women’s 200m event, with the semi-final round scheduled during the evening session on Tuesday 19 July and the final on the evening of Thursday 21 July.
More About PUMA
PUMA is one of the world’s leading sports brands, designing, developing, selling and marketing footwear, apparel and accessories. For more than 70 years, PUMA has relentlessly pushed sport and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. PUMA offers performance and sport-inspired lifestyle products in categories such as Football, Running and Training, Basketball, Golf, and Motorsports. It collaborates with renowned designers and brands to bring sport influences into street culture and fashion. The PUMA Group owns the brands PUMA, Cobra Golf and stichd. The company distributes its products in more than 120 countries, employs about 16,000 people worldwide, and is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
Global sports company PUMA has taken its ‘Forever Faster’ Spirit to the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon in the USA by outfitting 12 national federations, including South Africa, and several leading medal contenders, and providing them with its latest Nitro technology, so they can perform at their best.
Ever since its foundation in 1948, it has been PUMA’s philosophy to provide the fastest athletes with the fastest products, an attitude summarised in the brand’s motto “Forever Faster.”
In Eugene, individual PUMA-sponsored athletes, performing in PUMA’s footwear technology, include men’s 400m hurdles World Record-holder Karsten Warholm of Norway, Swiss men’s pole vault World Record-holder Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis, triple Olympic sprint medallist Andre De Grasse of Canada, Ukrainian women’s indoor high jump World Champion Yaroslava Mahuchikh, Italy’s men’s high jump Olympic Champion Gianmarco Tamberi, triple jumpers Patricia Marmona of Portugal (Olympic silver medallist in Tokyo) and Will Claye of the USA (former World Indoor Champion), women’s pole vault double Indoor Champion Sandi Morris of the USA, and many more.
The athletics federations of Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland and Trinidad and Tobago will all perform in PUMA apparel.
“Track and field is sports and athleticism in its purest form, and is embedded in the very core of PUMA,” says PUMA CEO Bjørn Gulden. “We are proud that many World Records were set in our shoes, and we are looking to our athletes writing the next chapter in sports history in Eugene.”
Current World Records in PUMA shoes are men’s triple jump (Jonathan Edwards, 1995), men’s 1000m (Noah Ngeny, 1999), men’s 3000m Steeplechase (Saif Saaeed Shaheen, 2004), men’s 100m and 200m (Usain Bolt, 2009), men’s 400m hurdles (Karsten Warholm, 2021), and men’s pole vault (Mondo Duplantis, 2022).
Even Better Spikes
PUMA has sent its athletes to Eugene with improved versions of its successful evoSPEED NITRO spikes, making them even lighter and more competitive. Furthermore, specially for Norwegian hurdler and World Record-holder Karsten Warholm, PUMA has created the ultimate hurdles shoe, the evoSPEED Naio NITRO.
There are also improved versions of the gold medal-winning PUMA evoSPEED Nitro Elite, and several new products for the long-distance runners. The evoSPEED Distance Nitro Elite+ 2 spike uses PUMA’s proprietary NITRO foam and a PWRPLATE for exceptional energy return, and is aimed at events ranging from 800m to 10,000m.
PUMA’s road racing athletes can choose from the DEVIATE NITRO ELITE 2, which is even lighter than its predecessors and also features a new last, or the futuristic and aggressively designed FAST-R NITRO Elite, which uses NITRO Elite technology and a PWRPLATE to support an efficient run.
The new racing shoes were unveiled at a special press conference at PUMA House in Eugene two days before the World Champs began, with a number of PUMA’s world class athletes in attendance. You can watch a recording of the press conference below
More About PUMA
PUMA is one of the world’s leading sports brands, designing, developing, selling and marketing footwear, apparel and accessories. For more than 70 years, PUMA has relentlessly pushed sport and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. PUMA offers performance and sport-inspired lifestyle products in categories such as Football, Running and Training, Basketball, Golf, and Motorsports. It collaborates with renowned designers and brands to bring sport influences into street culture and fashion. The PUMA Group owns the brands PUMA, Cobra Golf and stichd. The company distributes its products in more than 120 countries, employs about 16,000 people worldwide, and is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
When Gerda Steyn posted a pic on social media of her race number collection and asked what other runners do with their numbers, it resulted in hundreds of replies and great suggestions. Edited by Sean Falconer
PUMA releases its first women’s specific running shoe!
For too long, running shoes have been made for men and then redesigned to fit a woman’s foot shape. This season, PUMA is rewriting that narrative with the Run XX NITRO, a running shoe made for her.
Named for the woman-specific double X chromosome DNA sequence, the Run XX stands behind PUMA’s ‘Run for Her’ positioning to prioritize female runners’ needs in the way we build and engineer our products. In collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Biomechanics Lab, PUMA launched a research study recruiting 224 runners who logged more than 36,000 miles over eight weeks. In conclusion, 81 percent of women in the study preferred the Run XX over the control shoe and said they liked the cushioning and responsiveness of the Run XX over the control.
“This was the first time we conducted a large-scale study on female runners and the results will help us shape our approach to women’s running shoes going forward,” said Erin Longin, General Manager of the Run/Train business unit at PUMA, adding, “I believe this study will help us to continue to support female runners and keep them running longer.”
The Run XX features a progressive, female-specific design. Featuring an updated fit that hugs a woman’s heel, instep, and arch, the running shoe’s new firmer NITRO Foam midsole is the perfect balance of durable and lightweight. The shoe’s RUN GUIDE promotes proper alignment and increased stability for longer distances.
“As a runner myself, I want to know my running shoes will support by own biomechanics because women are made differently, and the Run XX does exactly that,” said Erin.
Run XX NITRO will be available from 24 June 2022 on PUMA.com, PUMA Stores, Totalsports, Superbalist, and selected retailers with a retail price of R3199.
ASICS is proud to announce the signing of Irvette van Zyl. Van Zyl is a long-distance runner with multiple South African titles and is the current women’s 50km ultramarathon world record holder. The Pretoria-based runner strengthens ASICS South Africa’s road-running athlete portfolio into 2022 and beyond.
“It is very special for me having a brand like ASICS – that has over 73 years of high-performance brand heritage – believing in me backing my dreams and goals,” said Irvette.
According to Irvette, aside from the performance aspect of the brand, she is a big believer in the importance of sport for mental wellbeing. “So ASICS’s ‘sound mind, sound body’ philosophy really resonates with me. When I go for a run in my ASICS, my mind and body are in sync, and it just sets the tone for my day,” she said.
Irvette made her marathon debut at the 2012 London Marathon, after which she turned her attention to shorter races on SA soil. Not long after, she began focusing on marathons and ultramarathons. She ran her best time of 2:28:40 at the 2021 Xiamen Tuscany Camp Elite Marathon in Siena, Italy. In May 2021, she broke the world record for the women’s 50km in a time of 3:04:23, bettering the previous record by almost three minutes.
Irvette races in the METASPEED™ Sky, a shoe developed at the ASICS Institute of Sport Science in Kobe, Japan, after utilizing the data accumulated from its athletes over the past year. Stride-style runners such as Irvetter take a longer stride once they increase their speed, but their cadence primarily remains consistent. Thanks to an energetic midsole foam and a propulsive carbon plate, Irvette will be able to conserve more energy while maintaining her pace at the later stages of the race.
“The METASPEED™ Sky is an amazingly speedy shoe to race and train in,” she said, explaining how her focus for the rest of the 2022 season is on bettering her 10K and half-marathon times, distances in which she has won SA national titles in the past. “Then, towards the end of the year, I will be looking to do a quick marathon, so hopefully, all the speed work on the shorter distances will go a long way to increase my speed,” she concluded.
Modern Athlete will be meeting with Irvette next week to discuss the move to ASICS and what this means for her career going forward. To be the first to hear all the news make sure to follow us on Facebook.
In celebration of Global Running Day which took place on 1 June, Under Armour hosted the UA ALL OUT MILE grand finale event which saw hundreds of athletes including elite athletes, novice runners, top club runners, celebs, sports personalities and the general public going all out to take on the ‘1 Mile Run’ around the iconic Green Point Athletics Track.
For the 2nd consecutive year Under Armour hosted its popular Global UA ALL OUT MILE campaign, where runners from across the world have been lacing up and training to record their PB over the iconic 1 mile (1,6 km) distance. The campaign kicked off in May and concluded on Global Running day with 14 events hosted in key territories across the Globe with Cape Town playing host to the South African leg.
With an impressive exhibition of running on display, an unprecedented total of 4 elite athletes managed to break the sub-4 minute barrier with Justin Kemboi from Kenya crossing the finish line with a time of 03:59.02 to take top prize as the winner in the Men’s Elite category.
20-year-old South African favourite Prudence Sekgodiso blistered through the field to secure bragging rights as the fastest in the Women’s Elite race with a time of 04:43.17. Other notable runners on the night included: Blitzbokke Captain Shakes Siviwe Soyizwapi, South African professional boxer and IBO cruiserweight champion Kevin Lerena as well as Stormers outside centre Ruhan Nel.
The Mile, much like the 100 meters and the marathon is still widely considered one of the most iconic distances and the pinnacle of athletic excellence. The first sub-4-minute mile was smashed in 1954 by Roger Bannister. His time of 3:59.4 has since been broken by over 1600 athletes worldwide. Two unmatched records still stand today in the ladies’ and men’s categories. The men’s world record stands at 3:43.13, set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1999 while the women’s record sits at 4:12.33 held by Olympic sensation Sifan Hassan, set in July 2019.
However, the mile isn’t only for a ‘pro’ or Olympic athlete, it’s the ideal fitness distance for runners looking to test their speed and endurance, regardless of age or ability. UA recognised the massive appeal that the distance holds and wanted to create a campaign that would challenge runners and encourage them to reach their best.
Commenting on a very successful event, Under Armour South Africa MD Darren Cooke says, “It has been amazing to see the ALL OUT MILE campaign come to life, particularly here in SA. Those in attendance were treated to a superb display of running with many setting new PBs. It has been an honour to host some of the top elite middle-distance runners and at the same time bringing the local running community together. Under Armour is dedicated to helping athletes, both pro and amateur, to continuously assess and improve their performance and this was definitely achieved with the ALL OUT MILE campaign.”
“One of the highlights of the evening was definitely the spectacular Elite men’s race, culminating in four world-class performances by 4 athletes running the mile in under 4 minutes. What an absolute privilege to bear witness to an incredible feat,” concludes Cooke.
Top 4 Male Elite Runners on the night:
