The first time he stepped on a skateboard — he can’t remember if he was 4 or 5 — Nyjah Huston felt at once free, unmoored to freestyle and create, and yet rooted by an internal zest to get better, be better and master every challenge the board presented. He learned how to do an ollie, and then did it repeatedly until he got it right. Tried kick flips, grinding rails, and felt the exhilaration amplify as the tricks became trickier, but he continued to own them.
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Onward, upward, transported like some urban Icarus atop his board, Huston flew up the ranks of his sport, higher than anyone else save maybe Tony Hawk had soared. He won the X Games 13 times and earned six world titles, feasting on fame, fortune and the trappings of his success. Millions of people followed him on social media, Nike crafted a shoe in his name, and celebrities knew him by name. He shuttered a dysfunctional relationship with his father and charted his own path. Made mistakes. Made amends. Made friends. Made enemies.
And then in Tokyo, he crashed like Icarus. Except his was no symbolic fall from grace. Favored to win skateboarding’s first Olympic gold medal, Huston instead fell four times and finished a dispiriting seventh.
Now 29, Huston remains every bit as famous as he was three years ago and will bear the same burden of expectations in Paris that he carted to Tokyo. But this time, when he drops in for his second go at Olympic gold, Huston hopes not to be the superstar on a quest to do what is expected of him. Rather, he plans to channel the little kid who first landed an ollie.
“Skateboarding is not a race,” Huston says. “It’s not track and field. It’s not something where you have to go out and be the fastest every time. I’ve gotten to the point where I gotta just sit back, go out there and enjoy this moment. That’s all.”
Huston’s oft-told backstory is now practically part of his sport’s lore – the prodigious skateboarder, reared in a strict Rastafarian household, taking to his board with his dreadlocks flowing, good enough to ink an endorsement deal at 7 and compete in the X Games at 11; the centerpiece of a complicated divorce that ultimately separated him from his father to embark on his own campaign, and then grew a social media army of millions, signed his own shoe deal and hit the intersection of both Instagram fame and legitimate stardom.
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Those, of course, are the Cliffsnotes. The reality of that life path is far more complex and, at times, painful. Huston’s father, Adeyemi, a former skater, isolated his family from a world he did not trust, the kids home-schooled and eventually relocated from Davis, Calif., to a remote mountaintop in Puerto Rico. It ended messily, after Huston’s mother, Kelle, left – “escaped” is how she has described it – and eventually filed for divorce, getting full custody of their five children. Amidst it all was Huston, a child left to reconcile a father who made him what he was but stunted him from who he could be, all while handling the burdens of business he was too young to comprehend.
Huston hasn’t spoken to his father in years, and ceremoniously sheared his dreads ages ago, a sort of reverse Samson effect that emboldened rather than weakened him. Now far removed from the fracture, Huston has found the space and grace to find gratitude in his father’s singular devotion to his early career. “He taught me how to be a real skateboarder, as far as a street skateboarder,” he says, “instead of just training to place well at a contest. A lot of parents wouldn’t have done that.” Huston pauses. “But it was hard,” he says. “I’m not going to lie.”
He did not get through unscathed. Released from a near-cloistered childhood and thrust into the trappings of wealth before adulthood, the same kid who didn’t even walk into a movie theater until he was 16 suddenly had money to burn, so he burned it. He bought fast cars, and piled up speeding tickets. He got himself a sweet house, and ticked off the neighbors with raucous parties, earning threats of public nuisance charges. He went to bars, drank too much and got in fights, one leading to an assault charge that was pleaded down to a misdemeanor after he claimed self-defense. Just last month, a woman filed a lawsuit claiming her attempts to intervene in an argument between Huston and a homeowner in 2022 led to Huston pushing her and causing physical harm. The case is pending.
The all-out binge on all he had missed gave the commercially appealing Huston street cred and a persona that suited the sport. Though the exact origins of skateboarding aren’t entirely clear, most agree that it began as a way for surfers to practice when the waves were flat – sidewalk surfing they called it. It grew in popularity through the 1960s, presenting a perfect vibe to match the era – cool, urban, casual and slightly counterculture. Long before skate parks popped up in suburbia, skateboarders would seek out rails or abandoned swimming pools, much to the frustration of the establishment, who viewed them as a menace.
The X Games helped mainstream the sport and gave rise to an appreciation for the difficulty involved in its execution. That mainstreaming, however, came with plenty of resistance from purists who didn’t want to lose the sport’s vibe. In 2016, when the International Olympic Committee approved skateboarding as an Olympic sport, targeting the 2020 Games, devotees worried it was just another sign of the sellout to commercialism. “Like many skaters, we have mixed feelings about skateboarding appearing in the Olympics,” a piece in Thrasher, the skateboarding magazine, opined. “And by mixed feelings we mean disgust combined with a headache.”
In that same December 2016 issue, Huston was asked his opinion. “I’m excited about the opportunity to be able to skate in the Olympics,” he said. “Whether people like it or not, skateboarding is bound to grow into bigger things like this sooner or later. So, in my eyes, it might as well be now.”
By the time skateboarding made its COVID-delayed debut in the Olympics, Huston was widely considered the best street skateboarder and competition skater in history, both a free-spirited creative badass and a flawless technician. His 5 million Instagram followers, Nike and Monster Energy deals made him popular; his skill made him singular. Though he finished second in the worlds leading up to the Games, Huston arrived as a heavy favorite to win the sport’s first gold medal.
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On the first day of Olympic competition, Huston popped in his AirPods – his music tastes change depending on what he needs, fluctuating from Afro house music to techno – stumbled a bit through his heat, but made it to the finals.
It all felt a little off. Tokyo remained off-limits to fans, so aside from the music between his ears, Huston competed in an uncomfortable quiet. It only maximized the weighty expectation he carried. He was, he knew, meant to both legitimize the sport as Olympic-worthy and yet somehow remain true to its free-flowing approach. Above all else, he was meant to win. “I felt an insane amount of pressure,’’ he says now. “Like from the whole world.’’
That’s not how Huston rolls. Even as he amassed multiple X Games and world championships, Huston remained the kid who first tried out a board. He loves nothing more than heading out to a park and jumping in with whatever locals happen to be about, and jokes that he could still skate a curb for hours. The goal isn’t to win so much as it is to figure out a new skill. Feel that rush.
Instead, when he dropped into the bowl at Tokyo, he thought almost exclusively about not failing. “I got stuck trying the same really hard trick,’’ he says. “It was just this really weird balance of feelings. It was so quiet, it felt like a practice session, but I also wanted it so badly because I knew I was supposed to win.’’
He saw the video on Instagram, posted by a kid named Trey. It was a kinked rail, skateboarding parlance for a railing that has a little bend to it, allowing skateboarders to jump from one to the next and perform tricks. Huston thought about the video for months and finally, on a hot day in August 2022 – just a month after winning the World Skate Tour in Rome – he and some buddies drove out to San Bernardino, to the back of a school where an innocuous-looking metal railing runs down an outdoor staircase.
Upon arrival, Huston did what he always does; he examined the layout, concentrating especially on how low the rail was. He looked at the run-up, considered how the downhill approach switched to almost a launch and thought long and hard about how to maneuver it. He debated if he was going to go for an easier gap grind or nose grind (which uses only the front of the board) and even asked a circling cop for an OK before launching.
Because this is Huston, a social media savant, the whole thing is on video and the fall doesn’t look bad. His board goes off the rails to the left, and Huston leaps off and falls on the sidewalk. But when he lands, he lands hard and stiffly on his right leg before crumbling to the ground. Someone oddly claps in the background, clearly unaware of what’s happened, while Huston tries to bear weight on his leg and cannot. Eventually his buddies turn his skateboard into a gurney and wheel Huston back to the car.
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Still convinced it wasn’t a big deal, he waited a week before going to a doctor to get an MRI. That’s when he learned the diagnosis: Huston had a partial tear of his meniscus, a fracture in his tibia and a torn ACL. “Every day something happens – hit the back of your head, twist an ankle – so it’s always like, ‘Damn this sh– hurts,'” he says. “But this was different.” This meant immobility for months, and more time off his skateboard than in his lifetime. Four months and 12 days after the injury, he filmed himself doing a kickflip and celebrated like he won Olympic gold.
The time off allowed Huston to refocus and reflect. He returned eager and yet a little more savvy, understanding that if he wanted to stay healthy for another Olympic shot, he had to strike the proper balance between advancing his routines without pushing the limits too far and risk injury. “That’s honestly something I struggle with,” he admits. “But the Olympics, that’s another level. You have to take it more seriously.”
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Huston has, to that end, been putting in serious training – watching his diet, adding hikes to improve his strength and endurance, and logging upwards of three hours of practice sessions a day – all for a routine that lasts 45 seconds. Huston is seeing the payoff. In May, he took fifth at World Skate Shanghai, and this month, he won the SLS Apex in Las Vegas. Next comes World Skate in Budapest and the X Games in Ventura. None of it will matter, he knows, until July 27, one day after the Opening Ceremonies, when Huston drops into the Place de la Concorde, a famous square near the Champs-Élysées, for the street skateboarding preliminaries.
Huston wants to win. Of course he does. “But to me,” he says, “this sport has always been a lifestyle, or a way of life. That’s why I always loved it.”
And it is precisely that he will chase in Paris.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of Nathan Groff)
