![]() There will be a gauzy rehash of his remarkable rise nearly 20 years ago, a boy among men, dreadlocks dancing behind him with every leap and twisting trick. There is often a shrug in his voice, a flat and unapologetic tone that says, hey, this is just what it’s like to be me.Īt the Olympics, Nyjah will stand out because of his status in skateboarding and because of his short shorts and long shirts over a body covered in tattoos from ankles to ears. “Always having all this pressure on me, and our family getting split because of my skateboarding career.” “The thing that I’m most proud of is getting through those rough times as a kid with my dad,” he said. Is he here because of his childhood, or in spite of it? Hidden somewhere in that sentence lies the mystery of Nyjah Huston, if not the answer to the central question of his life so far: In one overstuffed sentence, it goes like this:īorn on a living room floor in Davis, Calif., raised as a Rastafarian with little interaction with the outside world, Nyjah was funneled into skateboarding stardom by a strict father, signed a skateboard deal at 7 and made his first X Games appearance at 11, relocated with his parents and four siblings to a remote farm in Puerto Rico, watched his career sputter in social isolation, played the role of the rope in the tug of war of his parents’ divorce, was unleashed as a millionaire teenager and bought a mansion and a Lamborghini and lost all connection with his father, became the best contest skater in history, threw epic parties and built a rap sheet, and is now trying to outgrow that phase - but not all of it, because this is skateboarding - just in time for the sport that he has dominated for most of his life to make its debut at the Tokyo Games. The Olympics have never had an athlete like Nyjah or a story like his. To put Nyjah’s fame in an Olympic context, he has 4.7 million Instagram followers - about three times as many as Shaun White, twice as many as Lindsey Vonn, far more than Michael Phelps and quite a bit more than Simone Biles. (Tony Hawk, now 53, may never surrender the title.) He has been famous for three-quarters of his life.īut a new audience is about to experience Nyjah for the first time as skateboarding makes its Olympic debut in Tokyo, starting with the men’s street competition on Sunday. He is the second-most-famous skateboarder on the planet. At 26, Nyjah belongs to the single-name realm of LeBron, Tiger and Serena. ![]()
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