“They should work like a Kalashnikov”

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I FOUND THIS ARTICLE (below) about a Russian gas-powered boot in this morning’s New York Times.

My guess: it's an April Fool's joke that's arrived two weeks early.

Some excerpts (see These Boots Were Made for 22 M.P.H.):

…Mr. [Viktor K.] Gordeyev invented a gasoline-powered boot that looks like pogo sticks that strap to your shins….[His] boots — which use tiny pistons — became classified as a Russian military secret until 1994.

…[T]he boots became a military secret, as generals envisioned soldiers running swiftly and effortlessly alongside armored vehicles.

The boots were declassified in 1994, and Mr. Gordeyev and his partners imagined growing rich by selling their invention to a lazy public. Instead, the company went out of business in 2006.

[Demo: emitting small puffs and eliciting big stares]

... Instead of fastening a seat belt, the … runner … strapped on shin belts…. Then he flicked an ignition switch.

Before running down a university corridor, he jumped in place a few times to warm up the engine. [The runner] then ran laps for about 10 minutes, going about 12 miles per hour, with the two-stroke boots emitting small puffs of exhaust.

…The tanks in the shoes hold a third of a cup of gasoline each and will take the runner three miles; that means the boots get about 70 miles per gallon.

[Pesky hazards, comrade:]

…“The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body,” [the runner] explains flatly.

The two powerful engines tend to throw a wearer off balance or cause knees to buckle.

Mr. Gordeyev … disagrees that the boots are dangerous and still has visions of their mass adoption. “We’ve been running in them for years and we haven’t had one trauma,” he said….

[A little history, a little fear, a little Smirnoff in your ear:]

First, [Gordeyev’s] institute tried to interest the Soviet Army.

“We ran in the corridor of the general staff building, in front of the generals” and the minister of defense, [one of the designers] said. “They liked it, and were even a little frightened.”

An order came down for the paratroop command to test the boots, and the design became classified. This gave the [Ufa State Aviation Technical] university access to [the Russian] space agency.

One result … was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it….


Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this.

After the shoes were declassified in 1994, when capitalism was beginning to sweep across Russia, the inventors decided to market the boot.

[Not yet safe, like AK-47, comrade:]

A former student, Anfis G. Saibakov, formed a company called Ekomotor to design a user-friendly version. He imagined people might want to commute in the boots, as they do on bicycles or rollerblades. None of this happened.

When Mr. Saibakov demonstrated the boots at Disney World in Florida in 1998, safety came up as a concern, he said, and the company lacked money to fine-tune the product.

“They don’t have characteristics that would allow an ordinary person to use them,” Mr. Saibakov said glumly, admitting that running in the shoes would always mean “taking certain risks.”

“They should work like a Kalashnikov,” he said….