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It was a party for Team USA at the men’s street skateboarding final. After the runs and tricks were done, Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston landed on the podium behind first-place finisher (and 2020 gold medalist) Yuto Horigome of Japan. Horigome scored 281.14, while Eaton narrowly missed out on gold with 281.04 and took home the silver. Huston clinched bronze with 279.38.
All competitors do two course runs, with the best of the two counting toward the final score, and Huston had two great runs before the trick stage. His first was fairly clean, earning him a 87.06 which landed him in the middle of the pack. His second run, however, was stellar. His 93.37 put him in first ahead of the tricks.
Eaton was in more of a pressure cooker leading into his second run. He took a spill on his first and scored a meager 61.77, which meant he needed to completely nail his second run to have a realistic shot at the podium. And Jagger Eaton, who is indeed named after Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, delivered in a big way. His second run was fantastic, earning a 91.92 and catapulting him into second place.
Huston and Eaton continued to wow the audience early in the trick stage, which involves five individual tricks, with the two best counting toward the final score. They both aced their first two tricks and remained in first and second, respectively, but each fell on their third trick. The true difference-maker was Eaton’s fourth trick. Everyone was going big, and so did Eaton. He landed hard but stayed on the board, and the judges rewarded him with a 95.25, the second-highest score in the entire trick stage. He leapfrogged Huston and took over first place.
The only trick that scored higher than Eaton’s was Horigome’s fifth trick, which earned a mind-boggling 97.08 and spoiled Team USA’s vision of going 1-2.
This was Huston’s first Olympics, but Eaton’s second. Eaton won bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.