Skateboarding
Skateboarding
So what’s it really like to skate the biggest ramp ever, Sandro Dias?
Sandro Dias dropped in from the biggest skate ramp ever. The Brazilian skate icon shares his thoughts on competition, mentorship, and how the feat pushed him to hit the gym for the first time – at 50.
In 1988, during the halcyon days, his career and skating in vert competitions, Sandro Dias visited Brazil’s coastal city, Porto Alegre, looked upon the newly constructed Centro Administrativo Fernando Ferrari (CAFF) building and beheld what skateboarders and wheeled-sport enthusiasts would picture for decades to come: riding down it.
The CAFF is home to various offices of public administration, and at 22-storeys-tall, the modernist monolith stayed with Dias vividly. He first proposed skating it about 13 years ago with the idea being batted back due to its surface being considered “impossible” to skate on and out of concern that attempting it might be fatal. Dias persisted, however, putting the idea forward every couple of years to no avail. But skating the Estaiadinha Bridge in his home city of São Paulo in 2019 seemingly helped move the needle.
Sandro Dias posing proudly on his Estaiadinha Bridge ramp
© Fabio Piva/Red Bull Content Pool
Sandro Dias skates the Estaiadinha Bridge in São Paulo
© Fabio Piva/Red Bull Content Pool
When the conversation came around three years later, the answer was “yes”. So, in preparation for the Red Bull Building Drop, at 50 years old and for the first time in his life, Dias did something which once felt foreign to many skateboarders but is steadily becoming commonplace: he started going to the gym.
Back when my life was in competitions, I was doing it for love as well
Throughout much of his career, skating in competitions was Dias’ livelihood. When the vert ramp becomes your workplace, the scoreboard could cast an ominous shadow, but across the decades, he maintained a mindset which seems at odds with the job description. “Don’t skate for results,” says Dias. “Back when my life was in competitions, I was doing it for love as well. I had to compete to make money for my living, but I was in love with skating. “If you don’t do it with love, there is no ‘essencia’ [essence], there’s ‘vacio’ [emptiness],” he says, dropping into his native Portuguese. “It would be something mechanic. I don’t want to do anything mechanic. I want to do something with passion. If you do it with passion and love, you do it better, and better. And you enjoy it more.”
At 50 years old Sandro Dias has totally rewritten the rules of vert skating
© Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull Content Pool
It’s something he tries to instil when coaching skateboarders today. At his skate camp, Dias works with up to 100 skaters, usually beginners, across two seasons annually, but also provides individual coaching to experienced skaters. Although working with vastly different levels of ability, the two kinds of mentorship have overlapped.
Now in its tenth year, Dias’ skate camp introduced him to the likes of Gui Khury and Yndiara Asp, the latter he has recently been coaching individually. She comes to their sessions consistently enthused to learn new tricks. They’ll pad up, Asp sets the agenda for a trick, Dias drops in and demonstrates, then talks through the minutia of Asp’s foot placements, timing and technique as she skates. Dias speaks of the speed of Asp’s progression, reflecting on the generational difference with he and his peers who wrapped their heads around tricks by studying stills and sequences published in the magazines, often more so than skate videos.
Yndiara Asp airs high at Red Bull Skate the View
© Naim Chidiac / Red Bull Content Pool
He first met Khury, whose talent is prodigious and acrobatic, when he was six years old. Ten years later, Khury is one of the few skaters capable of spinning 1080s and was the first to kickflip into a 900 (in its non-fliptrick form, Dias himself was once one of the few able to land the 900 for a number of years). In a circular moment for Brazil’s vert legacy, Khury also helped provide resources to Dias in preparation for his record-breaking drop-in at the Centro Administrativo Fernando Ferrari building.
Guil Khury jumps over a Red Bull Racing car
© Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull Content Pool
In the months leading up to the feat, Dias visited Khury’s mega ramp in Curitiba, South Brazil, working towards holding 350kg of weight on his upper body whilst dropping in on a quarterpipe, to acclimatise to the g-force he’d later face when cascading down the CAFF.
Whereas to train for the speed he would reach, an estimated 125kph, Dias first hit up friends who were dedicated downhill skaters, which was met with equal parts hype and confusion. “They thought it was cool, but I didn’t say anything about why. So people were tripping,” says Dias. As his confidence grew, he took a trip to Salzburg, Austria, to take skitching (holding on to a vehicle whilst riding a skateboard) up a few gears, hitting speeds of 136kph whilst being towed around an airport runway.
The last thing to prepare for was the impact of dismounting from the drop-in. “We had this freaking airbag,” says Dias, setting the scene for a Looney Tunes-like collision on the runway. “It was growing and growing and growing [closer] and boom!” He worked his way up incrementally from speeds of 30kph to 70kph. Flying into it felt like a mental reconditioning of what is otherwise second nature for skateboarders. “We avoid obstacles and falls. It was hard at the beginning to [intentionally] hit a wall in front of me,” says Dias.
Hitting the wall: Dias had trained to come to a safe stop
© Joerg Mitter/Red Bull Content Pool
We avoid obstacles and falls. It was hard at the beginning to [intentionally] hit a wall in front of me
The Red Bull Building Drop calls to mind a sub-genre of vert skateboarding that emerged in the 2000s, combining vert with record-breaking feats. The DC Video, released in 2003, ends with Danny Way achieving world records for “long distance jump” and “highest air” on a skateboard in a video part filmed predominantly on the emergent mega ramp (Way also used such a structure to jump the Great Wall of China two years later). Flip Skateboards’ Xtremely Sorry in 2008 captured Bob Burnquist base-jumping into the Grand Canyon. He again packed a parachute to cap off his genre-defining mega ramp part, Dreamland in 2011, as he airs onto a helicopter and then skydives from it.
Throughout the 2010s, however, vert on the whole waned in popularity, but in recent years, the discipline has been on the rise. Last year, 14-year-old Arisa Trew made history as the first woman to spin the 900, still a watershed accomplishment for vert 25 years since Tony Hawk first landed the spin. Jimmy Wilkins’ captivating float and technical ability draw adoration not only from vert skaters but street skaters and magazine editors from Thrasher Magazine to Rolling Stone.
On the day of reckoning, Dias dropped in four times successfully
© Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull Content Pool
On September 25, 2025, Dias began to work his way up the facade of the CAFF building, which was outfitted with an overlay for him to skate down. “It’s crazy to say, but I was super calm because I did so much training. I visualised doing that drop-in so many times. The thing I was paying most attention to was how to do the drop-in,” says Dias of his final descent from 70 metres, which reached a speed of 103kph. “At the biggest height, because it’s so long, I knew that my body would have to be super light before hitting the building ramp, then I needed to put pressure on my legs to stay on my board and have control.”
Despite the immense scale of the feat, Dias’ drop-in reflects two fundamentals of skateboarding: the anticipation and nerves of learning to drop-in, as well as seeing a potential “spot” in anything from a two-inch crack in the ground to a 22-storey skyscraper. The CAFF building, which reads as a 'ramp' to even the most pedestrian eyes, has long inspired playful speculation and skate culture dreams about its appearance, that is, ostensibly, a giant quarterpipe. (However, Thrasher Magazine editor-in-chief, Michael Burnett, posits it is more like a “giant China Bank”, referring to a famous San Francisco skatespot.)
The iconic CAFF building turned into the world's biggest skate ramp
© Fabio Piva/Red Bull Content Pool
In the weeks leading up to the Red Bull Building Drop, that conversation gained traction online. “I’m from Porto Alegre and can confirm this is the realisation of everyone's childhood dreams,” wrote one Reddit user. “Thinking about going down this building’s 'ramp' is something that lives rent-free in the minds of everyone who lives here,” wrote another. “Does it look like it’s going to end badly? Yup. Will it be a collective catharsis moment, albeit a questionable one, for the city? Also yes.”
Dias’ Red Bull Building Drop also affirms something that first became apparent 25 years ago with Tony Hawk’s 900 at the 1999 X-Games: putting a skater on a large ramp to accomplish something that’s never been done translates – clearly – the spectacle of skateboarding for unfamiliar audiences. Hopefully, some of that audience is enthused enough to become skateboarders themselves. Dias laughs, knowing such novel and terrifying occasions aren’t a sustainable or sensible path for the future of building skateboarding. He hopes that the publicity of the event leads to more attention on skateboarding, especially in his home country of Brazil.
Ultimately, however, the accomplishment lies with scratching what could be considered a longstanding cultural itch, the collective inside joke of skating the CAFF. “Every skater who passes by the building thinks the same as me, it’s the imagination of the skateboarder’s mind.”
Hit play below to see Sandro Dias perform his jaw-dropping world-first:
21 min
Red Bull Building Drop highlights
Skateboarder Sandro Dias sets two world records descending from a 22-storey building in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
