Maria Tickle: What is the Holy Grail of the sports shoe today? Like, what is everybody trying to achieve in their technology?
Simon Bartold: Well we do have a perfect model to work from, and that perfect model is called a human foot. Theres really been a direct change in paradigm in the last 3 or 4 years, and that is, we always used to look at motion control, so if we saw somebody who was moving in an abnormal way, wed try to control that abnormal motion. We now understand that its pretty much impossible to do that, and rather than trying to control a foots motion, we want to try to enhance that foots motion. So we want to try to get the shoe to work with the foot rather than against it. So the Holy Grail really is to try to design athletic footwear that is very light, that is very flexible, that has specific areas of high shock absorbency or shock attenuation, whatever you want to call it. And also to try to make sure that every little subtle movement of the foot is allowed to occur and that the foot is allowed to feed back information to the brain, so that it can do its job properly. So the best analogy I c
