PARIS — Canada’s fastest woman over 100m has some purple praise for Paris’ purple track.
“It’s fast, it’s nice, and it’s a nice feeling,” Audrey Leduc said Friday, moments after running 10.95 seconds to lower her own national record by 0.01 seconds in the first round of the Olympic 100m.
The 25-year-old from Gatineau, Que., who is making her Olympic debut, finished first in her heat, which sends her through to the semi-finals on Saturday.
“I didn’t really experience a lot of fast tracks around the world, it’s one of my first, but it was good, a good feeling.”
While most tracks used in international competitions are red or blue, the brand new nine-lane track hosting Olympic athletics events at Stade de France is unmistakably shades of lavender and violet.
And under that purple surface is some state-of-the art technology.
Mondo, the Italian firm commissioned to produce the track, describes it as “cutting edge.”
“For the track, we only see the aesthetics, but there is great work that goes into the underlayer,” Mondo research and development manager Alessandro Piceli, the research and development manager told Olympics.com.
That underlayer is low density and incorporates “ellipse impulse technology,” which means it is full of elliptically shaped air cells intended to return maximum energy to athletes; in other words, it’s sort of bouncy. Earlier tracks have used hexagonal shaped air cells, which are less flexible and have smaller contact surfaces.
Trent Stellingwerff, the senior advisor for research and development with Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, explains that calculations used to determine the optimal energy return of a track have changed in the last decade as shoe technology has evolved. While much of the conversation around heavily cushioned carbon-plated super shoes has been focused on road running events, today’s track spikes are also more cushioned and use different foams than they did a decade ago.
“There’s an optimization step with these new foams (in spikes) to make sure that the track hardness is appropriate for most athletes,” Stellingwerff says.
“Where it gets a little bit tricky is you could probably drill down and say the track hardness you need for the 100-meter dash might be slightly different than the 10,000.”
Mondo says running efficiency on the purple Paris oval is nearly three per cent greater than on its famously fast and bouncy track used for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Installation of the prefabricated track — which replaced the previous blue oval in the 26-year-old stadium — started in April 2024. The unorthodox choice to make it purple stemmed from a desire of Games organizers to ensure an optimal television experience with contrasts that highlight the athletes.
“It’s a track, it has to be pretty, but above all it’s a stage on which the athletes are going to perform. What’s very important is that the colours and the athletes stand out,” Alain Blondel, the Paris Olympics athletics and para athletics manager, told Olympics.com.
The outside of the track is grey, in homage to the asphalt track used at the 1924 Paris Olympics.