What the Rules Settled and What They Did Not
The regulations resolved the fairness question and left the comparison question permanently open. Capping stack height and requiring general availability means that everyone lining up in a major race now has access to broadly equivalent technology, which is what a sport needs in order for a result to mean something. It also drew a stable boundary that manufacturers can develop within, and development has continued inside it, because a limit on thickness is not a limit on how good a foam can be.
What no rule could do is restore continuity with the past. Athletics accepted an era break in exchange for a technology it was never going to be able to prohibit, and the honest way to read the record now is with that break acknowledged rather than argued about. The wider lesson is about sequencing. The sport was slow to regulate the shoes not because it failed to notice them, but because its existing rules described mechanical assistance while the advantage came from material properties, and rules written for one kind of advantage do not catch another. That gap, rather than the shoes themselves, is what let a footwear change rewrite a sport's record book.
