Much of the hype surrounding the Olympic’s debut of Skateboarding has been centered around Team USA’s Nyjah Huston, some calling him the Lebron James of Skateboarding and rightly so. Nyjah has been skateboarding professionally since age 11. I remember watching him flying down huge sets of stairs when he skated for Element. Nyjah’s skating was highlighted in his video part in the Element skate video “Elementality” He was this little guy with long dreadlocks skating to Bad Brains and throwing down huge tricks….it was super impressive and definitely made an impact on skateboarding. The media really focused on Nyjah for the 2021 Olympics and pretty much thought he was a shoe in for the Gold medal in the Men’s Street skateboarding event in the olympics. To be honest, I was too. I mean, Nyjah has won 10 street gold medals in and 16 overall medals at the X Games! He seemed to be a highly likely candidate for Tokyo Gold!
Despite some early stumbles in the third heat, Huston advanced to the final eight and so did his teammate, 20-year-old Jagger Eaton. It was hot and you could tell it was getting to the competitors some of which were skating injured or broken. South African skater Brandon Valjalo competed with a broken wrist and Huston has just sprained his wrist and Portugese skater Gustavo Ribeiro had recently hurt his shoulder. No excuses from this group though. They put it all on the line. Huston unfortunately just could not get his board to cooperate on his last 4 attempts and he was done but American Jagger Eaton had gotten himself into Silver medal position then got knocked down to bronze by Brazilian Hoefler with one last chance to move back into Silver but fell on his final trick so stayed in third place to bring Team USA skateboarding it’s first Olympic Bronze Medal!
Gold Medal – Yuto Horigome (Japan)
Silver Medal – Kelvin Hoefler (Brazil)
Bronze Medal – Jagger Eaton (USA)
