Throw away your trainers

Sportswear fans of the world unite, and throw away your trainers!

Not only is this fashionable footwear hideous, it may even be damaging to run in, according to Northumbria University sports scientist Dr Mick Wilkinson

A sports scientist has claimed that flexible, flat shoes are better for you than more expensive, cushioned trainers 

By Harry Mount

The biggest disaster in the history of footwear was the development of ethylene-vinyl acetate, or EVA. EVA is the squidgy cushioning – formed by millions of microscopic air bubbles – slapped on to running shoes in the Seventies. Suddenly, we went from elegant plimsolls and Dunlop Green Flash (as worn by Fred Perry in the Thirties) to the most unflattering shoes ever invented. The gaudy dinghies at the end of our legs got even bigger in 1979, with the insertion of the air bubble into the heel of the “Nike Air” model.

The modern trainer – outsized, brightly coloured, smelly – is the polar opposite of the beautiful shoe. Now, the one supposed merit of this form of athletic footwear – that it’s good for the health of the running human body – has been officially attacked.

Dr Mick Wilkinson, a Northumbria University sports scientist, told the British Science Festival in Newcastle this week that flexible, flat shoes are better for you than more expensive, cushioned trainers. Feet are meant to land on their front part when you’re running; trainers with cushioned heels force you to land on the heel, causing a sharper shock and adding extra strain to joints such as the knee. Already, in America, barefoot running has become popular, as people realise that humans are designed to run long distances without having to wrap their feet in the scientific equivalent of cotton wool.

It’s too much to hope for that children – and their parents – will immediately ditch their stinking, lurid trainers. The trainer is too embedded in modern fashion for that. But still, here’s hoping that there’ll be a gradual return to the slimmer, prettier gym shoe, which dominated sports from the late 19th century until the dreaded introduction of EVA.

The gym shoe, or plimsoll, was the result of another invention: the adaptation of vulcanised rubber to footwear. Under vulcanisation, natural rubber loses its stickiness, as well as its brittleness when cold and its softness when warm. In the 1870s, John Dunlop’s Liverpool Rubber Company patented a way of sticking rubber to canvas, and the gym shoe was born.

It assumed different incarnations on either side of the Atlantic. In America, it became known in the 1880s as the sneaker – thought to derive from the silence of the rubber sole. Keds was one of the first companies, in 1917, to sell the sneaker on a mass scale. In the same year, Converse launched its own All Stars basketball shoe.

Over here, as early as the 1890s we had the J W Foster – later to become Reebok – running shoe, the first to include spikes. In Germany, in 1925, Adi Dassler – father of the Adidas brand – dreamt up a whole range of running shoes, with customised varieties of spikes.

For all their early popularity, running shoes then were used for exactly that – running. The idea that you might wear them with a suit – as Paul McCartney and bolshy teenagers do at formal occasions – would have been an outrageous demolition of the Chinese wall between formal clothes and sportswear.

The Americans were the first to break down this wall. In the Twenties, American boys started to wear Converse off the baseball field in imitation of their heroes. By the Fifties, sneakers were a mass-market item for American teenagers, not least thanks to the almost complete absence of school uniform – in 1957, 600 million pairs a year were sold.

We lagged behind – not just in terms of consumption, but also acceptability at formal gatherings. As late as the Eighties, Peter Cook was refused entry to his favourite casino because of his shoes. When offered alternative footwear, he said, “What? Play without my lucky trainers? You must be joking.”

The first classic “trainer” – the 1968 Gola training shoe, thought to have provided the origin of the word – would not have been allowed in many restaurants, let alone casinos. Then, in the Seventies, barriers to sportswear in non-sporting scenarios collapsed. Look at a photograph of the typical British family on the beach in the Sixties, and compare it to the Eighties. We began to look like a nation of retired sportsmen, who had given up exercise and turned our attention to chips, but held on to our old kit.

By this stage, the conditions were perfect for the creation of hideous sportswear. In 1977, Jim Fixx, the inventor of jogging, wrote his bestseller, The Complete Book of Running. Dress codes collapsed: Woody Allen wore trainers to the ballet; Dustin Hoffman sported a pair as the Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men. And podiatrists were recruited by trainer manufacturers to start bulking out shoes with all that supposedly health-protecting sponge.

Britain’s feet gave in without a battle, swayed by the trainer’s popularity with rappers, and lucrative endorsements by sports stars. In the mid-Eighties, I remember buying a pair in Pembrokeshire, and being told by the salesman that they were “excellent for school – and disco”. The idea that I might use them for neither, but to play football in, hadn’t occurred to him.

Over the past 30 years, that attitude has come to dominate the British wardrobe. But maybe, just maybe, these latest revelations will reverse the trend. Sportswear fans of the world, unite, and throw away your trainers! Your knees will thank you, and a nation’s dress sense will recover some of its dignity.