Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The shoes that competitive runners wear are the most essential piece of equipment in their arsenal, and the companies that produce them devote a ton of money to perfecting their design. That includes Puma, which has been hit with a lawsuit by a former track star who claims her career was cut short by the kicks they provided her with.
Abby Steiner enrolled at the University of Kentucky in 2018 as a two-sport athlete, as she harnessed the speed that helped her win multiple championships as a high school sprinter in Ohio to excel on the soccer field.
However, she opted to focus exclusively on track after her freshman season with the Wildcats, which turned out to be a pretty good call based on how things ended up panning out.
In 2021, Steiner earned first place in the 200m at the NCAA Division I Indoor Championships. She defended her title the following year and also came in first in the outdoor championships while setting a college record that still stands with a time of 21.80 seconds (six months after establishing the mark to beat in the indoor 300m at 35.80).
She finished her college career as a four-time national champion with the title she also earned as a member of Kentucky’s 4x400m relay team, and she earned a sponsorship deal from Puma as she turned her attention to a professional career and the opportunity to qualify for a spot at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
However, Stiner suffered a number of setbacks as her career was derailed by a string of foot injuries, and she asserted the shoes the company supplied her with played an instrumental role in those ailments in a lawsuit she filed against the manufacturer.
Sprinter Abby Steiner is suing Puma over injuries she claims stemmed from the shoes they designed in conjunction with the Mercedes F1 team
On April 26th, Sabastian Sawe became the first person to run an official marathon in less than two hours when he crossed the finish line in London with a time of 1:59:30.
That achievement was made possible with the help of the shoes he was wearing, specifically the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3s that weigh just 97 grams and were designed to maximize the amount of energy retained with each stride (they retail for $500 but have popped up on resale sites for thousands of dollars in the wake of that feat).
Shoes are just one of the many factors that can impact a runner’s performance for better or worse, and according to The Athletic, Steiner believes the ones she got from Puma checked that second box to the point where it may have brought her career to an end.
In 2025, Steiner announced she was “taking a step back from running” to pursue a master’s degree at the University of South Carolina while citing injuries that forced her to undergo multiple surgeries on both of her feet in the span of a year.
Based on the lawsuit she filed in Massachusetts last week, Steiner believes those injuries can be traced back to shoes that Puma designed in collaboration with engineers for the Mercedes Formula 1 team, blaming the carbon fiber plate and “nitrofoam technology” incorporated into them for her ailments.
The filing specifically mentioned the Deviate Nitro Elite 2 and 3, evoSpeed Tokyo Nitro, and evoSPEED Tokyo Nitro 400M. It alleges they were “unsafe, unreasonably dangerous, defective, and capable of causing injury and harm” and “altered the biomechanics of runners” while increasing the stress and strain at the root of the foot injuries she fell victim to.
Neither Puma nor Mercedes has responded to the lawsuit as of this writing, and they have until August 24th to officially do so in court.