Project Amplify, the Nike-Dephy collaboration that pairs a carbon-plated trainer with an ankle-cuff motor and drive belt, is explicitly framed as a shoe for the recreational majority running between ten and twelve minutes per mile. It is not a racing product, it is not aimed at elite athletes, and it will not be sold in the launch window in any size that would fit a competitive marathoner. None of that has stopped the regulators from being asked to think about it well in advance of any commercial release.
World Athletics' current shoe rules sit in Rule 5 of its Technical Rules and the supplementary World Athletics 2025 footwear regulations. The relevant clause defines an admissible competition shoe as one that "shall not be constructed so as to give an athlete any unfair assistance or advantage", and the more recent supplementary text bars any embedded mechanism that "imparts force or returns energy beyond that of the foam, plate or upper construction" of the shoe itself. Project Amplify, with a battery, motor and active cuff that pushes against the lower leg, would not satisfy either of those tests.
For elite competition, then, the answer is unambiguous: Project Amplify is not a road-race-legal shoe today, and Nike has been clear that it has no plans to apply for it to be one. The harder questions sit in the consumer market. Mass-participation events such as the Wings for Life World Run, Berlin Marathon's open waves and the Great North Run hand age-group records to runners who could in principle put on an active shoe and reset their personal best by minutes. The London Marathon's age-group record holder for men's 70-74, currently set in 2:46:19, would be inside the all-comers' record by a clear margin if even a fraction of Amplify's claimed assistance translated to that runner.
Race directors have already begun to ask the question of governing bodies in private, even though no powered shoe is on sale. Abbott World Marathon Majors has told Running Lookout that it is consulting with World Athletics on a clarification that would explicitly bar powered footwear from any entry that earns prize money, age-group recognition or a Boston Marathon qualifying time. The UK's England Athletics is reported to be drafting parallel guidance for results submissions to its UK National Rankings, with implementation pencilled in for the start of the 2027 road season.
None of this is a rebuke of Nike. Project Amplify is, in the company's own words, a project to make slower running and walking easier and more enjoyable for the very people for whom modern racing flats offer the least benefit. The risk is not the product itself but the regulatory grey zone it has opened. Mass participation running has spent the last decade absorbing the disruption of carbon-plated super shoes; if powered footwear arrives in even modest volume by 2028, race organisers and national governing bodies will need a much clearer set of rules in place than they have today.