Few shoes score as highly in both sports and style than the Nike Flyknit Racer. Flyknit, as the name suggests, is a lightweight knitted textile composed of polyester yarns—essentially a sneakersock rendered in resilient, ultralight fibers, carrying less than half the weight of some traditionally-made cousins. When attached to a minimalist foam sole, those weight savings compound. Take a normal shoe, cut all the fat and you’re left with the Racer.

A marathon flat by any other name, the Flyknit Racer is an ultralight low-top runner that debuted on the feet of the world’s elite athletes at the 2012 London Olympic Games. Anchored by the striking looks of its one-piece Flyknit upper, the Racer has since become a visual calling card for sleek, performance-driven design. The all-time grail? 2016’s “Indigo,” a hand-dyed Flyknit Racer made in celebration of the 2020 Olympics and limited to just 100 pairs.

Elite runners and #streetbeasts live wildly different lives, but since 2015, a single shoe has carried each over pavement with ease. Billed by adidas as “The greatest running shoe ever made,” the Ultra Boost is a biomorphic distance runner crafted from the best performance tech in the shoe biz. While a Primeknit upper keeps your foot snug at a savings, the Ultra Boost’s claim to fame is its full-length Boost foam sole. Licensed to adidas by German chemical supplier BASF, Boost (development name: Infinergy®) is a high-resilience foam that provides both cushioning and energy return.

Before Boost, each run began with a choice: lace up in firm shoes that returned energy or comfortable pillows that made hard surfaces bearable? Now, each run begins with Ultra Boost. From a style perspective, it’s hard to top the simplicity (whether caged or “uncaged”) of the Ultra Boost. Striped down to what amounts to a Primeknit upper, a directly attached Boost sole and laces, the sheer simplicity of the silhouette makes it easy to punctuate nearly any ensemble.

Two years after Flyknit took over the track, the first knit Nikes set foot on court. Despite initial skepticism (“You think a track shoe could handle 4 quarters of ankle breaks?”), the Kobe 9 Elite didn’t just hold up – it showed up. Lightweight, responsive and built for quick laterals, the shoe debuted during Bryant’s third-to-last season, setting Nike on a course it’s held to this very day.

The Kobe 9 reads like a laundry list of the Swoosh’s cutting-edge tech: Flywire around the midfoot, Lunarlon cushioning underneath and a carbon fibre heel counter only added to the “wow” factor of Nike Basketball’s first full-length Flyknit. Although dozens of Flyknit basketball shoes have followed in its wake, the Kobe 9’s breakout pedigree (plus the calf-length Flyknit sock on the Highs) makes it our choice for the performance court shoe with style. Nike’s legendary HTM would seem to agree.

The original Reebok Pump was a towering high-top basketball shoe designed around its namesake internal inflation mechanism. In practice, a pair of fully pumped Reeboks would lock your ankle in as tight as comfortable, making sure leg and foot moved as one on fast breaks. Dominique Wilkins wore Pumps. Shaq wore Pumps. Dee Brown famously won the 1991 NBA Dunk Contest in his pumped-up kicks.

The Reebok Pump Supreme brings an updated version of that storied Pump cushion to a stripped-down low-top. With a carbon fiber-stabilized midsole, an engineered fit sleeve (which compresses the upper to the top of the foot) and a seriously wild slip-on, Pump-to-fit entry method, the Pump Supreme is a stylish, futuristic evolution of Reebok’s iconic tech. While you won’t really see any NBA stars wearing the Pump Supreme on court like they did in the '90s, landing a Vetements collab is as close to a slam dunk as it gets in today’s fashion world.

While not a sneaker in the purest sense, Nike’s Special Field Boot (SFB) is every inch as much “performance shoe” as its knitted low-top cousins. First unveiled in 2005, the Tobie Hatfield-designed boot features a Natural Motion cushioning unit sandwiched between a water-resistant combat boot upper and a rugged-yet-flexible rubberized outsole. The result? A sneaker-boot hybrid that’s both comfortable and durable, no matter the stress put on it. If a tech breakdown isn't enough reason to buy into this sneakerboot, the fact that there are iterations of the SFB that are Army Regulation (AR)670-1 compliant (aka, worn by present-day servicemen and women) should assuage any doubts.

The SFB has gained a foothold in street style thanks to the co-sign of menswear tastemakers ranging from Kanye West and Shia LaBeouf, who’ve both been spotted wearing the boots as part of military-inspired ‘fits. Just remember to tuck your pants in.

A Boost family within the Boost family, adidas’ PureBoost line is the Darwinian finch of the performance running space. While the Ultra Boost’s shape has remained relatively constant over time, the PureBoost (another low-top, knit-sheathed Boost runner) has spawned a variety of variants, each more specialized than the last.

In no short order, the PureBoost line in full includes the: PureBoost (for runners), PureBoost R (also for runners), PureBoost DPR (for street runners), PureBoost ZG (“zero gravity”), PureBoost X (specially shaped to the feet of female athletes) and—last but not least—the PureBoost Y-3 (Yohji’s take on the PureBoost). The good news: they’re all geared for performance and movement. The bad news: choosing one just got that much harder.