American BMC rider Tejay van Garderen has been on Pearl Izumi shoes for a while now, and for this year's Tour de France, the Colorado company made 100 Tejay limited edition pairs with Zen warrior graphics on the soles and insoles.
The shoes also feature a new BOA closure that ratchets in both directions.
The illustrations on the sole show a Samurai-looking figure standing with two swords on the sole, in front of a diamond that represents van Garderen's daughter's birthstone. On the insole, the figure is wielding one sword over his head.
"Tejay wanted graphics to represent his 'Zen warrior' mentality," said Pearl Izumi brand manager, Andrew Hammond. "He's pretty fired up on the design."
The new BOA IP-1 reel is exclusive to Pearl Izumi, and, for now, is only featured on this Tejay van Garderen PRO Leader II shoe. While standard BOA designs pop open to loosen, and then ratchet one way to tighten, this reel also ratchets the opposite direction for incremental loosening as well as tightening.
The shoes are quite light – a claimed 245g for a size 43 and 268g for our size 45.5 test model.
The new BOA IP-1 reel micro-adjusts in both directions
Pearl claims the seamless upper to be the thinnest on the market, at a skinny .9mm thick.
Stay tuned for a review of the shoe, and in the meantime check out our profiles of van Garderen's BMC Timemachine time trial bike and SLR01 road bike and this review of the BMC teammachine SLR01 Ultegra, a more down to earth model with the same top-end frame that BMC is currently racing.
The shoes go on sale this Friday.
Only 100 pairs of these shoes were made
