kiteboarder, I just dealt with adidas headquarters in Oregon recently regarding a defective cycling product. It seems as though cycling isn't a core business, at least not enough to justify distributing in house, or so important that they formed a separate company to deal with it. In 2003, I think they bought Mavic and merged it with adidas cycling to form a separate company called Mavic-adidas Cycling.

My RMA experience:
I bought a pair of Adidas Pingora MTB shoes last October from Nashbar. They were on clearance (apparently they were 2 years old). Less than a few hundred miles later, the shoes ripped apart:


After getting an RMA from adidas (painless), they called me up and told me that Mavic-adidas Cycling was refusing to replace them since they were so old. So to make up for it, adidas sent me a $60 gift certificate for their online store. $50 + $10 I spent shipping the old shoes back to them. Think I broke even or actually made a few dollars off this entire transaction.

Anyway, I've always been a big adidas fan, and am even more so now. I've used their gear for wrestling, track, football, rowing... any type of shoes I needed, I always went with adidas first, and as you can see from my story above, their service is pretty good too.

Ended up buying a pair of real road shoes: Adidas 06 Adistar Super-Pro Classic