The Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 is now the most expensive marathon racing shoe ever traded on the secondary market, with men's size 10 listings on StockX reaching $5,500 in the 36 hours after Sabastian Sawe's 1:59:30 world record at the London Marathon. The shoe, which retails at $500 in the United States and €500 across Europe, was released in extremely limited quantities on the Adidas Confirmed app on 25 April, two days before Sunday's race. Most sizes sold out inside 90 seconds, and the lowest current bid on StockX for any size sits at $1,671 according to data published by SoleRetriever on Monday afternoon.
The frenzy is the most extreme example to date of the resale economics that have crept into the elite road shoe market over the past three years. Nike's Alphafly 3 and Vaporfly 4, while occasionally limited, have rarely fetched more than three times retail in resale; the Asics Metaspeed Sky Paris saw multiples of two during its 2024 launch window. The Evo 3, by contrast, is currently trading at six to eleven times retail, a level normally reserved for Air Jordan 1 collaborations or the rarer Yeezy releases. StockX confirmed on Monday that the shoe was the most-traded model on its running category for the seven-day window, eclipsing the cumulative volume of the previous Pro Evo 2 over its entire 18-month life.
Adidas's response has been to confirm a wider autumn release timed to the Berlin Marathon weekend on 27 September, with a target stock figure that the company described in a Monday investor briefing as "materially larger than Pro Evo 2 at launch but materially below mass-market Adios Pro 4 levels". Adidas Running general manager María Culebras told reporters that the company expected the release to remain "scarcity-led" through the autumn marathon majors and into early 2027, but that consumer demand would be served through a combination of the Confirmed app, six European specialty doors and three United States specialty partners. No date has yet been set for general retail availability, and Adidas has not commented on whether retail price will move.
The shoe itself, at 97 grams in a men's US 9, is the lightest super-shoe ever raced at world record level. It pairs a thinner Lightstrike Pro midsole with a redesigned forked carbon plate that, on the basis of independent lab data published by Road Trail Run last week, returns roughly 4.6 per cent more energy at 4:30/km pace than the Pro Evo 2. The reduction in mass is achieved largely through a near-translucent upper made from a single-layer ripstop mesh, which Adidas concedes will not survive more than 100 km of elite-level use. That durability profile, more than the price, is what is likely to keep the Evo 3 in the racing-only category for most consumers — but the resale numbers suggest a sizeable cohort will buy it anyway.
For the wider market, the Pro Evo 3 release also marks the first time that the Brand-with-Three-Stripes has overtaken Nike on a single-day footwear share basis at a marathon major in more than a decade. Adidas put 14 of the men's elite top 20 in London into the Pro Evo 3 (Nike had four, On had two), a flip from the position in Tokyo as recently as March, where Nike had 11 of the top 20. Whether that share is sustainable into the autumn — and what Nike's Alphafly 4, which is now confirmed for a "Berlin or Chicago" race debut according to Eliud Kipchoge's manager Jos Hermens, will deliver in response — will be the gear question of the second half of 2026.