The price of road cycling shoes has skyrocketed. Look at the top-of-the-line offerings from some of the most popular brands and it's astonishing.
The Specialized S-Works Torch shoes are £350; Trek’s RSL Knits cost £399.99; Shimano's S-Phyre shoes are £350; the DMT Pogi’s will set you back £440; and the Sidi Shot 3s cost an eye-watering £449.
I began to see brands adding high-tech parts and materials to their road cycling shoes in 2011.
I recall baulking at the then-radical and lightweight Bont Vaypors' price tag of £235 – today, the updated Vaypor SL is over £135 more expensive. The handmade-in-Italy Sidi Genius 5 Pro had a retail price of £175, now Sidi’s top shoe is £449 – more than double.
I don’t mean to single out Bont and Sidi, but these two examples show a price increase even after the 2011 prices are adjusted for inflation.
Is it the materials?
Bike kit – like everything – has generally increased in price recently, but I think we’re being taken for a ride when it comes to cycling shoes.
Consider the carbon fibre that’s used to create the super-stiff soles in these shoes.
For my size-45 feet, that’s 29x10cm at its widest. A square metre of aerospace-grade hi-mod carbon fibre would run to about £50. So that’s about 35 per square metre.
Let’s say a lightweight road sole would have a maximum of six layers. Maths would suggest that’s around £8.57 of the highest-grade carbon per foot, so £17.15 in carbon per pair, at the very most.
In context, a typical bike frame can use up to seven square metres of a blend of fibres and weaves (not all at the highest prices). A pair of shoes uses a fraction of that.
A Tour de France race bike frame, such as Giant’s TCR Advanced SL, costs £3,999.99. That’s 123 shoe soles (£1,054 of carbon). So, it’s not the ‘expensive’ stiff carbon sole where the price is coming from.
Now, I get the upper design is complex and takes plenty of work. But, again, is there enough material and work involved to justify the extortionate prices?
Why is road cycling more expensive than any other sport?
The FIFA World Cup is taking place as I write, and if you look at the feet of French football superstar Kylian Mbappé, his Nike Mercurial Superfly 11 Elite boots cost £274.99.
These boots are specialist sports footwear, much like cycling shoes. However, they’re £165 cheaper than cycling superstar Pogačar’s signature shoe, and both have a similar 3D-knitted upper and laces.
The NBA finals have also taken place in the last couple of weeks. New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson wore a pair of Nike Kobe 6s that retail for £174.99. That's a fraction of the price of a top-end cycling shoe.
Okay, so footwear for football and basketball will have an economy of scale that cycling does not.
But even cricket shoes (another niche sport) are cheap compared to cycling shoes. The Adidas 22yds Incurza, worn by Ben Stokes, cost only £140.
Perhaps the best comparison is between shoes made by Sidi, which produces cycling and motorcycling footwear. Former Superbike World Champion Álvaro Bautista wears the limited-edition Sidi MAG 2 Air Bautista boots. These cost £409.99, which is £40 less than Sidi’s top cycling shoes.
There are still plenty of options for a fraction of the cost
Of course, you don’t have to spend £500 on road shoes, and my advice is you shouldn't.
There are plenty of great options at lower prices. DMT’s KR4 cycling shoes have a lot of the same features as the Pogi’s but cost only £131.
New brand O2C has a nice lightweight road shoe called the Vector RC1 at £174.95, and the Specialized Torch 2.0s cost £165, which is far more reasonable than its S-Works shoes.
You also need to ask whether the performance promises of the top-spec shoes are really justified for your riding. The top-spec shoes might be lighter than the cheaper models, but by a margin that won’t make a huge difference to your riding.
It’s also been suggested that stiffer shoes don’t improve performance, so that top-spec carbon sole might be redundant anyhow.
Either way, the football World Cup has made me wonder if we’re being fleeced for accepting such high prices. I certainly think so.
