adidas has rebuilt the Freerider, and the result carries two logos for the first time in the shoe’s run. The Freerider Pro BOA and a clip-in version of the same shoe lead a four-model range arriving in March 2027, and they are the first Five Ten shoes to wear the 3-Stripes and the 5.10 mark together. For a label adidas has spent more than a decade quietly absorbing, that second logo says more than the new dial does.
The Freerider has been the default flat pedal shoe since 2009, and the reason has always been the rubber rather than the shape. Five Ten built it on STEALTH, a climbing compound soft enough to deform around pedal pins and hold a rider’s foot in place with friction alone, no mechanical attachment involved. That was the entire pitch, and it worked well enough that the model became shorthand for the category. Riders talked about the shoe the way climbers talk about a rubber, in terms of stick rather than fit or weight. The Five Ten HELLCAT followed as the clip-in option, and by 2010 both shoes were turning up on World Cup podiums. Five Ten and adidas joined forces in 2011, which handed adidas a real technical brand in a category it had never competed in seriously. What followed was fifteen years of gradual absorption. Five Ten kept its name and its catalogue, but the shoes drifted steadily toward adidas construction, adidas lasts and adidas distribution.
The Pro BOA is the flat pedal model and it keeps STEALTH rubber throughout, which is the part Five Ten riders would have rioted over losing. A single Li2 BOA dial handles the closure, paired with an asymmetric PERFORMFIT WRAP and an integrated debris shield. The toe box is now five layers deep with PORON in the stack, and the upper is built asymmetrically to take side impacts, which is an honest read of how flat pedal riders actually go down. The clip-in model runs a double Li2 BOA and swaps to STEALTH Marathon, a harder compound meant to survive the grinding a cleat interface puts into a sole. Its cleat slot gained 5mm of rearward adjustability, a small number that matters enormously to anyone who has tried to get their cleats far enough back on a gravity shoe. adidas developed the flat model with Brendan Fairclough, Vero Sandler and Danny MacAskill, and brought the same performance footwear apparatus it uses on its racing shoes to the clip-in, which was built alongside Greg Minnaar, Vali Höll and Dakotah Norton.
The two logos are the story. adidas has spent fifteen years deciding how much of Five Ten it wanted visible, and the answer kept trending toward less. Putting the 5.10 mark back on the side of a performance shoe, next to the 3-Stripes rather than in place of them, is a reversal, and it lands in the same season adidas gave the Samba a Five Ten outsole and a climbing last. Read together, those two releases look like a company that has decided Five Ten is worth more as a visible technical credential than as a quiet parts supplier. There is a version of this where the sub-brand gets folded away entirely, and adidas appears to have chosen the opposite.
The clip-in Freerider is the other admission. Five Ten’s identity was flat pedals, and the Freerider was the flat pedal shoe. Cutting a cleat slot into it says adidas now believes the name travels further than the orthodoxy attached to it. Riders who bought into Five Ten specifically because it refused to chase the clip-in market will have something to say about that, and they will not be wrong to raise it.
The Pro BOA sits at $180 and the clip-in at $250, with the wider range opening at $120. That is a broad ladder for one franchise, and it signals that adidas intends the Freerider name to cover the whole category rather than a single price point. The $250 clip-in is the aggressive end, asking gravity racers to pay a premium built on a rubber compound and 5mm of cleat travel. Five Ten has never been the cheap option in this category, and the people who care about pedal grip have generally treated that as the cost of entry. Whether they extend the same patience to a clip-in version is the open question, and the answer will say something real about what the Five Ten name is still worth on its own.
The Freerider Pro BOA and Freerider Pro BOA Clipless arrive in March 2027 at adidas.com and through the adidas app, in UK 3 to 9 for women and UK 5 to 14 for men. adidas has not published style codes for either model. The clip-in has already been raced, debuting at the Whistler World Cup under the Norco adidas Race Division, so the production shape is settled even with the retail date still months out.
Read next: The complete 2026 World Cup archive, every match, every goal, and the kit and boot each one was scored in.
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