The polls are closed and the votes are in: Canada's Flat Spot skate shop is the winner of the second annual Create & Destroy DIY spot contest.
Hosted by Vans and Spitfire, the friendly competition pitted five shops, each from a different country, to build their own renegade skate spot, film inaugural sessions, and submit a three-minute edit for a few weeks of online voting.
In the end, Flat Spot ended up with 7,640 votes (edging out Mexico City's Destructible skate shop by just 299 votes) to take home the grand prize: a $2,000 party budget to throw a celebratory blowout, and another $1,000 to improve their winning spot or get started on another.
Flat Spot's Trevor Rowan, 36, who opened the shop in 2006 in West Hamilton, Ontario, told ESPN.com that his build crew had no previous experience working with concrete and that they had wasted a week trying to find a secret location to break ground.
"We finally found an old house foundation hidden in the forest and just started building," he said, adding that what they lacked in construction skills they made up for with marketing efforts.
"Lots of promotion," Rowan explained. "That seems like the way to win this thing. We went to war everyday" promoting the contest and their submission on the shop's website and through various social media sights and skate forums and encouraging people to vote with product giveaways, he said. "Networking with everybody. Just putting out the blast."
"I thought [Destructible's] spot was awesome," Rowan added, referring to the Mexico City shop's pump-bump to corner-pocket layout inside an abandoned building. The two shops remained pretty much neck-and-neck during the voting window.
"At the end of the day, though, I think everybody won," Rowan says. "I mean, just look: there are now five brand new spots for people to skate. And this whole experience just makes us want to build more spots, you know?"
That's the point, says Jim Thiebaud, VP of Deluxe Distribution, which heads up Spitfire. "We enlisted five world-class shops to build their own spots and film them in hopes their videos will inspire others to do the same."
GRAND PRIZE:
Flatspot (Canada)
7,640 Votes ($2,000 party budget and $1,000 improvement budget)
FIRST RUNNER UP:
Destructible (Mexico)
7,341 Votes ($1,000 party budget and $500 improvement budget)
SECOND RUNNER UP:
Fifty-Fifty (UK)
5,016 Votes ($500 pizza-party budget)
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Fast Times (Australia)
510 Skateboarding (USA)
