The new Adidas "freerider"
Interview by: Carson Kropfl
"It's a shoe that's going to look good going fast."
- Dakotah Norton
That's how Dakotah Norton sums up Adidas Five Ten's newest drop, and it's a fair thesis. The line includes the Freerider, Freerider Pro, Freerider Pro BOA and Freerider Pro BOA Clipless. At the UCI World Cup in Whistler, Canada, we caught up with the people behind the shoe and the riders that are now lacing it up. Norton credits Adidas Five Ten for getting the best athletes in one room: "When you get all of the best athletes in the world running this product in one room and talking about how to make the shoe as good as it can possibly be, that's where you see a shoe that comes out this good." Senior Global Product Manager at Adidas Luke Hontz says the process took patience. "We had over a decade to ask what was wrong with the shoe, what's new, what we need to change," he says, and it took plenty of iterations to get there: "We would look at about six different designs before we even saw the shoe. Then we saw six iterations before the first sample, and about 15 in total once we kept tweaking."
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For a downhill racer, the shoe has to disappear, and performance comes first. "You want something that's going to be crazy comfortable, but also it has to perform at the highest level because when you're racing, you're chasing tenths of seconds," Norton says. "To have a shoe that you can hike in, ride in all day, stand in the pit in, and race in, and essentially do anything you want in, is pretty cool to see." He added. Hontz says style was never meant to come at the expense of function. "I want to be able to hang out in my shoes and then go have a beer afterwards. You want to go to the bike park and shred, and then be comfortable in them after."
As someone just stepping into the world of mountain biking, it's cool to see how much influence from other action sports are found in mountain biking, from the rider down to the shoe. The freerider has the steez of a skate shoe but the performance of a proper mountain bike shoe. In my eyes it’s the perfect balance of form and function.
