I like that we can have more variety, more people competing, and overall different modalities to test human performance.
> Swimmers and coaches began to realise that breaststroke was quicker when a swimmer recovered their arms forward above the water and the arm technique – as well as the swimming term ‘butterfly’ – was born.
From the Wikipedia article on Fosbury:
"The technique gained the name the "Fosbury Flop" when in 1964 the Medford Mail-Tribune ran a photo captioned "Fosbury Flops Over Bar," while in an accompanying article a reporter wrote that he looked like "a fish flopping in a boat." Others were even less kind, with one newspaper captioning Fosbury's photograph, "World's Laziest High Jumper""
There's no real way to compare the butterfly and the forward crawl that doesn't make the butterfly look like a ridiculous farce.
If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.
I would prefer that shoes be restricted to designs that don't allow for higher efficiency than barefoot running, but sport rules tend to lag technology advances.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Vaporfly_and_Tokyo_2020_O...
World Athletics defines the rules for shoes in most running events. They're limited to a stack height of 20mm or 40mm depending on the event (along with certain other limits).
https://worldathletics.org/about-iaaf/documents/book-of-rule...