With the Action Sports market one of the fastest growing segments of the Outdoor Industry, Teva is looking to capture a bigger slice of the pie. The company originally dabbled in skate inspired styles with the Gnarkosi water shoe and Links freeride mountain biking shoe released the summer of 2011. Now for 2013, Teva has a full bike collection featuring 9 different styles, including the company's first shoe for those clipless lovers out there.
Partnering with Crankbrothers, Teva pedals its way further into the mountain biking world with a clipless all-mountain bike shoe. Still in the prototype stage, the flat profile skate style Pivot mountain bike shoe made it's debut appearance at Eurobike last week.
The Pivot features a Spider rubber outsole similar to the Links with lugs added for traction when pushing your bike up the trail. A large strap across the forefoot adds extra stability when pulling up on your pedals to crank uphill.
While virtually all other brands that make a skate inspired cleat-compatible shoe tend to simply drill holes in the bottom of skate shoes, Teva has worked with the Crankbrothers team to engineer a proper mountain bike shoe from the ground up. To achieve the required stiffness, Teva built the shoe on a fiberglass shank with plastic and stainless steel plates around the cleat to reduce wear. The team has also supposedly thrown out the standard bolts and come up with a new method for mounting your cleats.
The Teva Pivot will be released sometime late 2013 with no pricing as of yet. I will update this post with pictures from Interbike in a couple of weeks. For all your mountain bikers out there, I am curious to know if you use clipless or flat pedals and why. Since I started out a roadie, I use clipless, but I am not sure this is the best choice for me (2 crashes already), although I ride nothing but hills around here.