📷 Photos by Charles Rivard, Esq.
The Dime Glory Challenge turned ten this year.
If you watch that first recap video from 2015, which was in a warehouse — and feels comparatively slapped together like you had a long weekend to bring your drunk, late-night “wouldn’t it be sick if” skate event fever dream to fruition — you get the sense that everyone there knows each other.
At the 2025 Dime Glory Challenge, which was in a maxed-out 5,500-seat tennis stadium, it is safe to assume that everyone did not know each other.
But they knew the lore. And through the lore of the Glory Challenge, regardless of its size, there is an interconnectedness to all of us in attendance.
One of the first people we ran into this year was Phil Lavoie, one of Dime’s founders and architects of the event. In earlier years, if you saw Phil at the Challenge, he was running around the course with a Mophie dangling from his iPhone, frantically filming every trick for the Instagram while making split-second admin calls with the rest of the overlords. If you saw him or any of the Dime guys at the afterparties in those days, there was this colossal sense of relief among them that it went off without incident.
This year, when we saw him and asked how he was feeling, the reply was, “I’m chilling. It’s bigger than me now.”
When writing about the Challenge in 2017, Zach Baker observed that “85% of their jokes don’t make it past Peace Park or a couple of group texts. The 15% that rises to the top, is still sometimes too stoned to explain.”
Those 15% have become embedded within the fabric of skateboarding, despite still being too stoned to explain. Not sure what percentage of people in attendance can pinpoint the origin of the Valdez salute, where this obsession with volcanoes comes from, or acknowledge the fact that Bryan is only one guy, and you know what? It doesn’t matter. Anybody getting bogged down in semantics probably isn’t very fun to skate with …and probably isn’t the best viewing partner for Glory Challenge, either.
The 2025 Dime Glory Challenge was originally scheduled for Saturday, August 30th, but on Friday, facing a 60% chance of rain on game day, the crew took an executive action in pushing it to Sunday, forfeiting exhibition of the Street Challenge. And man, it fucking poured on Saturday, at least until around 3 P.M., after which an impromptu undercard of street challenges was hobbled together at Peace Park and the Hôtel de Ville hill, the two historic Street Challenge sites.
On a clear-skied Sunday, doors for the Challenge opened at 1 P.M. Unlike in years past, which were centered around three to four hours of theatrics in a singular space, the 2025 Dime Glory Challenge was an all-day affair, taking place on festival-like grounds with arrays of booths for sponsors, food, and choices for viewing experience. By the time Tom Scharr rolled down the 22-foot-tall spine ramp volcano, it was almost 10 P.M. and you had switched where you were sitting or standing at least a dozen times.
For some veteran spectators of the Glory Challenge, there was a temptation to compare it to earlier iterations. Among some — mainly the nostalgia-inclined types — there was almost this yearning for it to be smaller, shorter, simpler. But as many have pointed out when surveying the landscape of skateboarding in 2025, this back-in-my-day thinking is a crutch, not an engine. To long for those warehouse days — when so much of the discourse about Glory Challenge was juxtaposing it against skateboarding’s Olympic acceptance and the peak years of Street League — is to miss the point entirely.
For us, as attendees of all but the first edition, the funnest part of 2025 was getting to vicariously experience Glory Challenge through the first-timers’ eyes: the younger skaters we know from New York carpooling across the Canadian border for the first time, new pros who we’ve met in passing at less exciting events, or even people who don’t skate making the trek to Montreal out of curiosity.
The Glory Challenge is not so much a contest than it is a funhouse distillation of what a session with the Dime crew would be. A friend’s wife once made an astute observation that any time he returns from a skate trip, he comes back talking different and in a way that makes no sense. As pods of skaters, those jokes we tell, the slang we use, and the lore we conjure up can all work to be greater than the sum of their parts — it is the reason our friends are our friends — and oftentimes, it can feel impenetrable to outsiders.
Dime’s secret ingredient is this ironclad belief that of course everybody worships Valdez, of course they’re going to get to the top of the volcano, of course they all know Bryan — he’s the Dime warehouse guy. It is the macro, dream-logic expression of being on the session with them.
It creates this world where Chloe Covell and Jamie Foy size up the same psycho rail, darkslide icons Trung Nguyen and Geoff Rowley are old friends, and Lizzie Armanto and Kevin Bradley just linked up to skate the same bank.
I have sessions in my life that would probably be an answer for The Bunt‘s “greatest skate moment” prompt. The Glory Challenge is Dime’s hallucinatory answer to what the greatest session ever was — told in a post-skate-trip foreign language that can still be understood by everyone from a non-skater, to an O.G. who was there for those Love Park or Pier 7 days you hear about. Comparing one Glory Challenge to another is silly. Nobody sits around going, “Man, September 7, 2002 at Pier 7 was dope, but it wasn’t as dope as May 19th, 2000 at Love Park.”
Whether there actually was anyone who didn’t get hit by dodgeballs, whether the lava burned when people fell into it at the Valdez Challenge, whether or not Tom Scharr’s Thrasher cover will ever hit newsstands — and wait, did that one dude even drop in once the entire day? — is irrelevant.
At the Glory Challenge, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.