The Technological Doping Framing
The phrase technological doping attached itself to these shoes almost immediately, and the reason it stuck is worth separating from whether it is fair. The objection was not that the advantage came from equipment, since running has always involved equipment. It was that the advantage was significant, obtainable by purchase rather than by training, and initially unevenly distributed, because the best versions were available to athletes attached to one manufacturer while their rivals raced in older technology.
That last point is what turned a technical question into a fairness question. A sport can absorb an equipment improvement that everyone gets. What it struggles with is a period in which the same race contains athletes with materially different equipment, because then results stop measuring the athletes. Distance running had a ready analogy in swimming's earlier reckoning with full-body polyurethane suits, where a buoyancy and drag advantage produced a burst of times that the sport later had to treat as belonging to their own separate era. The precedent shaped how quickly athletics reached for regulation, and it shaped the form the regulation took.
