Is La Sportiva’s Ondra Comp the Best Indoor Shoe of 2024?

03.04.2024 01:16

Paulin, Ari

Our Thoughts

La Sportiva’s line has traditionally been biased in favor of stiffly structured shoes. Even its softest products like the Solution Comp and the Theory are built with a supportive P3 system that disperses the shoe’s bendability across the foot rather than providing it with a single hinge point. Now—thanks, apparently, to Adam Ondra’s prodding—La Sportiva has decided to lean into a smeary specialization, building a shoe that is designed to hinge under the main joint of the big toe, allowing it to excel on the volumes and smedgy* edges so common in modern gym and competition bouldering. The resulting Ondra Comp is one of the strangest new performance shoes on the market. It took me several sessions to revise my footwork tactics (heels up!) before I started to get a feel for the shoe—after which I began using it all the time.

*To smedge is to stand with a smearing posture on an edge or sloping edge. In a recent EpicTV video, Ondra accidentally tries to take credit for the concept and term, but both have been in use for decades. The first mention that I can find on climbing.com is from a shoe roundup put together by Chris Weidner in 2008.

The Ondra Comp has had only a limited in-store release to date, and is not yet available for purchase online.

Rethinking shoe shape

To achieve the sort of competition capabilities Ondra wanted in a comp shoe, La Sportiva didn’t just remove structure and support in order to achieve smearing performance—something they did for the sock-like Mantra, which, frankly, was too soft for my weight. Instead, they took an innovative new approach, building a highly structured shoe whose entire design is in the service of smearing.

This involved doing two very clever things.

The shoe’s tendency to bend under the big toe when extending off flat feet takes getting used to, but it ultimately allows you to extend further than you otherwise might—albeit at the expense of that extension on more incut feet. (Photo: Emma Hine)

1. They shortened the half sole.

The Ondra Comp’s shortened half-sole (the front part of the shoe; see photo below) is reminiscent of a tactic made common by La Sportiva’s chief competitor, Scarpa, on its soft shoes like the Drago, Mago, and Veloce Lace. The short half sole effectively expands the shoe’s bendability—either upward in the case of the Ondra Comps or downward as Scarpa generally intends—and maximizes the foot’s surface area on sloping volumes, allowing the shoe to assume the shape of the old upward-bending board-lasted trad shoes designed for Yosemite slabs.

Note how much larger the half sole (the black rubber above the yellow) is on the Solution than on the Veloce L and Ondra Comp.

2. They built an innovative midsole and flexible arch.

Unlike those stiff old-school shoes, however, the Ondra Comp’s three-part midsole design (called the Sense Grip technology) allows you to maintain a flatter foot shape when applying pressure on smaller feet and to curl downward and grab holds with your toes in the steeps.

What’s innovative about Sense Grip?

The Ondra Comp’s midsole (the area of the shoe you actually stand on) has three separate parts. First, there’s the basic 3.5mm Vibram XS grip 2 rubber—pretty sticky stuff. Second, under the toes, there’s a 1.1mm U-shaped band of LaSpoFlex midsole rubber, which lends extra support for very small footholds. And third, in between the U, there’s a soft rubber pad embedded into the 3.5mm Vibram layer, which softens that section of the shoe considerably (it’s so thin it almost feels like you could punch your thumb through the rubber—I tried but I wasn’t able to) and gives the Ondra Comp its distinctive big-toe hinge point.

The shoe hinges significantly under the big toe while other shoes distribute that upward bend over a larger part of the shoe. In this case, the author is pushing hard into a foot while yarding off double underclings on one of the many home wall projects he has yet to send. (Photo: Emma Hine)

Combined with the flexible upper, the soft pad also increases the midsole’s pliability on slopers, essentially allowing the metatarsals in your feet to expand as they do on impact in minimalist running shoes. But it also allows you to do the opposite and grab at footholds with your toes, giving the Ondra Comp a surprisingly socklike feel that performs nicely on boards.

There are two cons to this system. First, it takes a little while (or did for me) to get used to a shoe that was designed to bend in the exact place most climbing shoes are explicitly designed not to bend (to increase edging performance). Two, the midsole does seem to be wearing unevenly, with significantly more wear appearing at the place where the U-shaped LaSpoFlex meets the soft SenseGrip pad.

You can see the different pieces of the midsole here—and how they wear unevenly.

Performance

Gym performance

It took me a few sessions to get used to the Ondra Comp’s upward-bending mid-foot, which rewards a heels-up rather than heels-down approach to certain types of footholds. (In any other sized-down shoe I’d maximizing smearing surface area on volumes by dropping my heels; but because of the hinge point in the Ondra comps, I had to learn to raise my heels on both edges and smears, as you might when walking up a slab in a running shoe.) I had several egregious foot slips during my first few outings in the Ondra Comp; but once I got used to the new footwork—which took less time than I’d have expected—I realized that the smearing and smedging performance is magnificent.

Comp boulders. Perhaps because I was raised in the days when the most technical move you’d find in a comp was a 360-campus, I’m not very good at modern comp-style boulders. But I nonetheless swallowed my pride and took the Ondra Comp on a few timid journeys up the foot-coordination slabs, long enough to realize that the shoe was far better in that style than I am.

Gym edging. The shoe did great on the vast majority of edges I found in the gym, but there was one climb, on my local gym’s 20-degree wall, where I had to press hard with my toes into a sharp one-pad edge while powering down on double underclings—and in that instance, with my weak toes bending upwards hard, I wished I had on something a bit stiffer. (Note: more than any other performance shoe I’ve encountered, the Ondra Comp rewards the sort of foot strength that folks like me, who’ve been down-sizing shoes for two decades, simply lack.)

Steep climbs. The Ondra Comps also served me well in the grabby steeps (they were on my feet when I sent my hardest ever indoor lead climb, which tackled the large 30-degree wall at Stone Age North in Albuquerque) and on the 47-degree woodie in my garage.

Hot take: the Ondra Comp not just for indoor boulderers

What surprised me most about the Ondra Comp was how versatile they are. While billed as a specialized gym bouldering shoe, they have nonetheless become my shoe of choice on the smear-intensive basalt and volcanic tuff outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unsurprisingly, the comp excelled on steep blocky sport routes where smearing and smedging is the name of the game; but they also performed admirably on 5-10 degree overhanging volcanic tuff. Tuff is a tricky sort of rock, and climbing it involves alternately toeing into pockets (something the pointy-toed Ondra Comp is great at) and smedging on grape-like bubbles; soft shoes (like Scarpa’s Veloce Lace) tend to feel too unsupportive for me on these bubbles, but stiffer shoes (like La Sportiva’s Miura VS) don’t mold around the odd and asymmetrical footholds. The Ondra Comp is—weirdly—one of the most comfortable shoes I’ve used on this sort of rock.

What’s it bad at?

I would never—ever—bring this shoe up anything that required true dime-edging on face climbs. The Ondra Comp is remarkably good on edges given the fact that it is explicitly designed to sacrifice its edging capabilities in favor of its smearing ones; but most of the Ondra Comp’s performance in that terrain relies on smedging, and that only really works on certain types of feet. It would be both challenging and exhausting to wear them on something for which the TC Pro or Scarpa Boostic is designed.

Toe hooking

Thanks to (a) its upward bend and metatarsal mobility and (b) the sticky rubber that sheathes nearly the whole foot, the Ondra Comp is a remarkable toe hooking shoe. Added bonus: there’s even some cushioning in the upper rubber, which makes sharp or dynamic toe hooks less likely to bruise your feet.

Sharp toehooks sure are comfortable with the Ondra Comp’s padding (Photo: Emma Hine)

Heel hooking

Heel fit is mostly a function of heel shape and arch size, but for me, the Ondra Comp’s heels are excellent. For context, I’ve got a narrow but mid-sized heel. Scarpa tends to feel too small, coming only partially up my heel, but some of the deeper Sportiva heels (like the Katana Lace and the Mandala) are so deep that they put intense pressure on my Achilles’. The Ondra Comp’s are a lower-volume version of the heels on the Vegan Skwama, the Solution Comp, and the Futura. The soft rubber is perfect for smearing heel-hooks on volumes, while the thin shape, for me, feels great when heeling on crimps or edges.

Sizing

I wear the Ondra Comp in a 39—the same size I wear in the Solution Comp, Skwama, Veloce Lace, Tenaya Mastia, and Futura. I size up when wearing flat shoes—and size down in the stretchy Testarossa. One note: It’s quite a narrow shoe. The wide-footed among you might prefer the Veloce L.