I have begun something of a quest to find the best cycling shoes for wide feet on the market. Since I spent a enlightening afternoon with a bike fitter and discovered I have wide feet, I have got rid of all my old bike shoes and swapped them out for ones more befitting a man with spade feet.
One issue I’ve noticed though is that wide shoes tend to be on the expensive side. Given that wide-footed people also ride bikes, and may not immediately want to drop £300 on something like a pair of Lake or Bont shoes, I think I’ve found a really viable gateway drug in the Fizik Vento Omna Wide.
I’ve tried out the majority of the brand’s wide offerings, and as well as being the cheapest, the Vento Omna is also the widest. How does it hold up as a shoe in its own right though? I’ve been using this against some far more premium competitors in recent months and am pretty pleasantly surprised.
Design and aesthetics
The Fizik Vento Omna Wide is a classic budget-focused road shoe. It’s not entry-level, but you’re still getting a nylon sole rather than a carbon one. I’m still not fully convinced that a carbon sole actually improves power transfer anyway, but it is definitely less stiff in this regard.
The closure is taken care of by a single BOA dial, with the cord lacing simply down the tongue in a way similar to how laces would. No funny business here, no additional tongues of material or cord lacing that purports to hug the foot better. Do the dial up and it just pulls the two sides of the upper together.
The nylon sole has one big vent in the front, but as I’ll go into below, just having a shoe that fits you better makes them feel better than any vents can. One issue with the sole that’s often the case with Fizik shoes is the cleat mount holes have no fore/aft movement. In order to get my preferred cleat position, which isn’t hugely extreme, I had to slam them as far back as they’ll go in the cleat slots.
‘Wider everywhere’ seems to have been the design ethos when it comes to the shape. Not only is the forefoot significantly wider than a standard pair of Fiziks (and comparable to a standard pair of Lake CX333, a Wide pair of Lake CX332, and a wide pair of Bont Vaypors) but the heel cup too is also wide. As well as being wide it’s also quite heavily padded, making the rear end of the shoe look a little bulky. In order to counteract the wider heel there are a series of rubberised dots on the inside of the heel cup to try and alleviate any heel lift.
As well as being wider, the shoes have a larger volume too, which is music to the ears of my incredibly high arches. The included insoles are as per more or less any cycling shoe in that they’re useless if you need any arch support, but there is plenty of room in the shoe for a decent set of aftermarket insoles - I’ve been using Cobra9 carbon insoles that are made for Bont shoes with great success and they can be trimmed to fit most shoes with ease.
A lightly perforated PU upper rounds out the design notes. No crazy lightweight materials, but that’s to be expected on a shoe with an RRP of £170.
Performance
I don’t think you’d ever class these as a race shoe by any means, but as a solid road shoe for recreational riding they tick all the right boxes. Most importantly they are wide enough to accommodate actually wide feet - 96mm at their widest point of the sole in an EU43 for reference. I don’t know of a shoe this wide at this price on the market, so for that they need shouting about separately from their performance positives and negatives - if you need wide shoes and you can’t go spending twice this on a set then that should be music to your ears.
On the foot though they work pretty well. They’re certainly comfortable, with absolutely no hotspots in my testing. Having a foot that’s significantly less confined has the feel of additional vents in a way, and while the front vent is great I’ve never been an evangelist about heavily vented soles - probably because it’s so damnably wet here in the UK it normally means a soggy foot rather than a cool one.
The lack of cleat adjustment built into the sole is something of a drawback, and while it’s not uncommon at this price point it’s becoming less common as customers get more in tune with bike fit best practices.
One thing I did notice about the sole is it can feel quite flexible in cornering. Because it’s wide and the upper is roomy, in essence when you weight your foot either inside or outside, you can feel the sole flexing. There’s little in the way of fore/aft flex, but the lateral one is the only time I found the nylon sole a drawback.
The roomy heel cup did allow an amount of movement, but given the type of riding the shoe is pitched at it’s forgivable, and forgettable too. I only noticed it when thinking about it. Most of it was alleviated in a decent way by the closure. A single BOA dial does mean you don’t really get to tune the fit, but like most single dial setups the closure naturally weights itself to the mid foot rather than the forefoot, which is my preference anyway - I like the area fore of my first toe joint to be as unrestricted as possible.
One thing to bear in mind for UK riders is that the heel cup, being so heavily padded, can get waterlogged and take a little longer to dry than some more premium, lightweight shoes, but compared to my all-leather Lake shoes which take a week to dry out fully after a deluge, they are absolutely golden. They are also quite similar to my Bont Vaypors, so it’s more a design choice rather than a feature of cheaper shoes.
Value
The fact that this is about as cheap as a properly wide shoe gets makes them decent value in themselves, but only by virtue of having a captive audience. As a shoe in their own right I think they perform about as well as the price would suggest, so not an absolute bargain, but not a rip-off either. I think if I were reviewing the standard width I’d be inclined to score them lower, but for those in need of wide footwear they could well be a game changer if you’ve been struggling with normal-width footwear as I had for years.
Verdict
If you have wide feet but have been unable to afford some of the myriad high-end options out there, then the Vento Omna Wide offers a really compelling product. It’s the widest of the Fizik wide range, as well as being the cheapest, and while it isn’t perfect it’s more than adequate enough for recreational riding.
Once you start really flinging the bike about, or racing, you’ll probably want a stiffer sole and a more supportive heel cup, but up to that point, they’re fine and have become a shoe I reach for in rotation with much more expensive pairs, so they get a seal of approval.
