Inside Dime's Live at the Olympic Stadium, Skateboarding's Wildest Anti-Competition

In a city of myriad public parks and lenient open-container laws, skateboarding thrives, despite—or maybe because—there being only 5 or 6 months of the year when the ice thaws and skateboarding outside is tolerable. When warm, sunny days are that precious, you make the most of them. And so Montreal’s skaters developed a reputation for high-level skating and intensely positive vibes. Over the past few years Dime’s videos have gained traction in the skate world, and Montreal has earned a gold star on the map of the world’s top skate cities along with better-established places like Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia.

Andrew Reynolds, Brad Cromer, Taylor Kirby, and Tiago Lemos

“We never planned for Dime to become a real brand,” Antoine Asselin, one of the founders, told me on the day of the event. “Eventually we made some t-shirts and it grew from there.” With the help of creative director Vincent Tsang, a clever obfuscation of the line between irony and earnestness, and a willingness to look at 90s skateboarding, sportswear, and luxury fashion through the same twisted kaleidoscope, Dime gear gained traction, too. Now you can find it on the shelves of globally renowned, nose-up fashion shops like Dover Street Market and Trés Bien, as well as at the Dime boutique on St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal.

But the Dime ethos doesn’t fully make sense until you put it into the context of a live event. Before Live at the Olympic Stadium, there was the Glory Challenge, a competition that was as absurd—and fun—as the title suggests. Dime invited skateboarders from around the world to participate in a skate contest with foam pit battles and blazing rockets of fire, and they came. The Glory Challenge became a premier event not just for large-scale, outlandish hijinx, but for the best skaters in the world to prove they could hang with the fun-loving French Canadians. But the crowds grew bigger and rowdier than expected; the towers of flame hotter, taller. “Glory Challenge is like the WWE,” Asselin says.

This year Dime put on a different kind of event, scaling back the spectacle to focus on the thing that its skaters do best: skateboarding. The decision to put the Glory Challenge on hiatus was, in part, about safety. Or, as Tsang put it, “Somebody was going to die.” So this past weekend the bill for Live at the Olympic Stadium read, hilariously: “In preparation for 2020, skateboarding's leading athletes will travel to Montreal to battle the Olympic Stadium.” Initially built as the site for the 1976 summer games, then home to the Montreal Expos, the stadium and its tiered brutalist campus has been given a third life as skatepark. Dime invited about 60 skaters from around the world, including Tony Hawk’s “brother” Mike—Mike Hawk!—to give it their worst.

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