The Samba has spent the last four years as the default answer to the question of what shoe to wear, and adidas has responded by pulling it onto a climbing last. The Samba Climbing arrives October 6, and it is not a graphics exercise or a hiking-adjacent lifestyle makeover. The flat gum cupsole is gone. In its place sits a curved Five Ten Stealth rubber outsole that runs up and over the toe, and the footprint underneath has been reshaped into the downturned, asymmetric profile a real climbing shoe uses.
The Samba is one of the oldest shoes adidas still sells, built originally so footballers could train on frozen winter pitches when a studded boot was useless. That is the whole design brief in one sentence, and everything the shoe is known for follows from it. The gum rubber sole exists because frozen ground needed grip without spikes. The low profile and the thin leather upper exist because a training shoe had to feel like a boot. The T-toe overlay exists to protect the part of the foot that hits the ball. For most of its first seventy years that combination sat quietly in the indoor soccer aisle, then it became the biggest sneaker in the world twice, once in the terrace era and again starting around 2022. What it has almost never been is a technical shoe. The Samba’s second life has been built entirely on the assumption that nobody is doing anything strenuous in it.
This one breaks that assumption in the only way adidas is actually equipped to. The company bought Five Ten in 2011, which means it has owned the rubber compound climbers treat as the benchmark for fifteen years and had never once put it under an Originals shoe. Here it does. Look at the outsole in the product photography and the word STEALTH is molded right into it. The heel carries a 5.10 mark in gray on the lateral side. The toe box has been narrowed and pointed, the last is visibly downturned, and there is an orange finger loop at the heel where the Samba normally has nothing at all. The leather upper survives, and so do the serrated three stripes and the printed Trefoil, so from directly above it still reads as a Samba. From the side it does not. The colorway is Core Black with Cloud White and Solar Orange, and the orange is doing the work of telling you which shoe this actually is.
Whether anyone climbs in it is a separate question from whether it is built to. Leather uppers scrape, laces are not the closure serious boulderers reach for, and the neoprene collar is a comfort decision rather than a performance one. But the honest read is that adidas did the expensive part. Swapping in a Five Ten outsole and a downturned last is tooling, not a colorway, and tooling is the line between a costume and a product. This is also the most interesting thing adidas has done with the Samba since the Samba got popular, because every other move has been additive. More colorways, more collaborators, more materials. Subtracting the gum sole is the first decision that risks something. The Samba’s audience does not climb. The climbing audience does not need a leather shoe. adidas built it anyway, and a brand sitting on a franchise this large usually does not. There is a second read available too. Climbing gyms have become one of the few growth categories in footwear while running absorbs most of the attention, and Five Ten has spent that whole stretch known to climbers and almost nobody else. Running its rubber under the most recognizable shoe adidas currently makes is the cheapest introduction the sub-brand has ever been handed.
Retail is $120, which slots it above the Samba OG at $100 and just under the Gazelle Indoor and the Handball Spezial family that sit at $110 to $120 on adidas.com right now. That is a modest ask for new tooling, and it is well under what a dedicated Five Ten shoe costs. The Samba OG’s resale market has been soft for two years as supply caught up with the hype, so the interesting comparison is not to the OG but to the odd technical Sambas adidas has floated before, which tend to move on scarcity rather than function. This one has a use case and an outsole nobody else can supply, which historically holds value better than a print.
The adidas Samba Climbing, style code KI6533, releases Tuesday, October 6 at 12:00 a.m. PDT on adidas.com in Core Black, Cloud White and Solar Orange for $120. A second white, black and blue colorway has been confirmed for October with no date attached. Stock should also reach Stadium Goods. For more on where the silhouette has been lately, see our coverage of the Pokemon Samba OG “Mewtwo” and the Asphalt Samba “Cannoli”.
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