Cycling Shoes: From Leather Boots to Carbon-Soled Clipless

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Boots and Toe Clips (1890s)

The earliest cyclists — Michaux velocipede riders, Ordinary riders — rode in their ordinary boots. The Safety Bicycle era of the 1890s introduced toe clips — small metal cages bolted to the pedal that held the foot in place — and toe straps that ran over the instep.

Toe clips and straps stayed standard for ninety years. They required the rider to reach down and tighten the strap before a sprint, and to loosen it before stopping — or risk falling over at the traffic light still attached to the bicycle.

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Nailed Cleats (1900s)

By the early 1900s, track sprinters and serious road racers were nailing leather cleats to the soles of their shoes. The cleat slotted into the pedal cage and was held in place by a tightly ratcheted toe strap.

This combination — nailed leather cleat, slotted pedal, toe clip and strap — was the racing standard from the 1920s through the early 1980s. It was powerful and dangerous. A crash that twisted the foot sideways could tear the cleat out of the sole and wrench the rider's ankle.

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Look PP65 (1984)

In 1984 the French ski-binding company Look introduced the PP65 pedal — a clipless mechanism adapted directly from a ski binding. A three-bolt plastic cleat bolted to the shoe sole; the pedal spring-clamped the cleat. You twisted the heel outward to release.

Bernard Hinault used the PP65 to win the 1985 Tour de France, and within five years the entire professional peloton had switched. Look's three-bolt pattern is still the dominant road cleat standard in 2026.

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SPD and the Mountain Shoe (1990)

Road clipless pedals worked because road shoes had smooth rigid soles that let the cleat protrude. Mountain bikers needed to walk, carry the bike over obstacles, drag the bike through mud.

In 1990 Shimano introduced SPD (Shimano Pedaling Dynamics) — a small steel cleat recessed into a lugged rubber sole, paired with a dual-sided pedal that shed mud. SPD became the universal mountain standard, and the recessed-cleat format spread to touring, commuting, gravel, and cyclocross.

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Carbon Soles and Boa Dials (2001)

Through the 1990s, shoe soles migrated from leather, to plastic, to fibreglass, to full carbon fibre. A modern carbon road sole is torsionally stiff — power goes directly into the pedal — and weighs under 200g for the pair.

Closure went from laces, to Velcro and ratchet buckles in the 1990s, to the Boa dial (2001) — a small rotary dial that tensions a steel-coated cable, allowing one-handed micro-adjustment on the bike. Almost every performance cycling shoe of the 2020s has either a Boa dial or an equivalent (Li-Nlink, ATOP), and a carbon sole.

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Shoe Timeline