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Street tricks are like stage magic. Something as seemingly mundane as a grom on a skateboard suddenly turns miraculous in the blink of an eye. But unlike stage magic, street tricks have a volatility that keeps both skater and spectator on edge. Even the best in the world don’t know what’s about to happen once the board leaves the ground.

Maybe with the right ritual (and a solid beer/weed buzz) any balls-out skater from California can push the boundaries and overcome the impossible. In a sport where flipping your board is like flipping a coin, it’s hard not to be superstitious. Not so with the young skate icon—and now Olympian—Nyjah Huston.

“Skating and being superstitious can mess with your head,” Huston shares following his photo shoot, “especially when we’re out street skating. I know Andrew Reynolds used to have to tap his board three times before he tried a trick. I dealt with that a lot as a kid, too. I would always be skating these massive rails, and I would be really scared. I’d be so in my head that I’d have to say a certain thing sometimes before going or give a roll up every single time. Now, I like to have a more ‘just fuck it’ mentality and go for things. It’s never good to be in your head too much as a skater.”

2020 marks skateboarding’s debut in the Olympic Games, along with surfing, among others. When I mention this to people, they’re surprised either sport hasn’t already been introduced. Many wonder what took so long. “I always knew skateboarding was going to grow,” Huston says. “People skateboard all around the world. I was a little confused why it wasn’t in [the Olympics] in the first place. Why it didn’t get in back when snowboarding did in ‘98. But it’s in there now. That was a smart move on their part, bringing some new vibes and energy to the Olympics. And we’re hyped for it.”

Huston talks in the royal “we” a lot, a clue to the pervasive machinery behind Nyjah Huston, flush with unprecedented success and nearly a dozen sponsors including Nike and Monster Energy. “It’s definitely a much bigger stage than we’ve ever been on. So, a lot more pressure. A lot of nerves. A lot of nerves are going to be going on out there.”

Tokyo 2020 was postponed to 2021, for obvious reasons. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have officially crashed the party. I’m writing this from the scorched West, where water wars will likely be televised in the near future and wildfires bloom each summer alongside wildflowers. In a dying world, sport reigns.

Even after being postponed a year, the excitement for the Olympics seems muted, some parts of the world punch-drunk from a Covid hangover, some parts still gripped in its stranglehold. In an era of sociopolitical dilapidation, rabid hyper-individualization, and polarized politics, what do the Olympic Games even mean? It goes without saying no other sport has a more cavalier attitude. “Skateboarding being in the Olympics is a really big deal—but nah, I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest thing to ever happen in skateboarding, or the biggest thing of my career. There’s so much more that goes into a skateboarding career, and so much more that skateboarding means to me than just going out and winning contests or even the Olympics.”

Skateboarding may be one of the last cultural artifacts that America has left to export. We can’t make summer blockbusters anymore, but we can skate. And it started when Californians started sidewalk surfing in the 1950s on makeshift skateboards when the surf was flat, and they never stopped.

Though he spent half his childhood in America and the other half in Puerto Rico with his Rastafarian father, and though he dons the red, white, and blue overseas, Huston’s allegiance is to California, the West Coast—the Edge. As the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer put it, “We are a coast people, there is nothing but ocean out beyond us.” And beyond that ocean is Tokyo, and the biggest stage Huston will have competed on in his already storied career. He may say that there’s more to skating than competing, but he’s got that killer instinct. It’s hard to deny. “That’s always the goal: stay cool and stay in your zone. But my mind goes all over the place before a contest. Even though I’ve been skating pro contests for 15 years now, I’m still just as competitive as when I started. It still means just as much to me. And I even try to tell myself sometimes nowadays, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve had a very successful career. Don’t tell yourself that you have to go out there and win every time.’ But it’s honestly just something you can’t really help. It’s that competitive nature. That’s just what it is.”

Skating introduced into the Olympics for the first time was, for a moment, the only thing that could’ve quelled the slowly unfolding disaster for Japan. If anyone can give American skating a run for its money (besides Brazil), it’s Japan. Except we barely heard anything in the media about skating—the focus was on the chaos.

The 2020 Olympics was supposed to be a marker for how much Japan had recovered—from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, a declining population, and falling into the economic shadow of China. Instead, it looked as if the 2020 Olympics, doomed before it even started, was yet another misfortune on the growing list. How was this going to shake out? I was intrigued. I was also on the road, dodging the Delta variant and doing my best to catch heats of Men’s Skateboarding in airport lounges and sports bars. What I saw instead was coverage on protests in the streets by locals outraged by the bloated Olympic budget, and at the Games’ officials ushering the rest of the world through its borders during a Covid resurgence.

What more appropriate time for the two California-born sports to make their Olympic debut than the helter-skelter shitshow of “Tokyo 2020”?

Skating is still outlawed in countless cities across the country, and surely the world—the only Olympic sport that’s barely legal. Surfing demands its participants to be in-tune with the ebbs and flows of nature, taking into account the phases of the moon and conditions on the ocean floor. Both sports bring a freewheeling and unique California vibe to the Games, and both sports have their Wild West lifestyles and innate personal freedom. Skating and surfing are the perfect vehicles for the collision of the Games and the End Times. It’s only on a board that you can ride the Edge.

Maybe our civilization teeters between outer space and bottomless pit, but—and I say again—if thousands of years of civilization has taught us anything, sport reigns in a dying world. Despite the fact that the only unifying factors in this nation are its own petulance and paranoia, it still counts to be the best, even in the Apocalypse. And who else would the US send than the guy who’s proven skating can be calculated, if you put the work in. The sport has never seen consistency like Huston’s, and, if I were a betting man, I’d wager he could kickflip-frontside-boardslide a rail 20 times out of 20.

He’s had several milestones since he’s started, none of which qualifying for the Olympics seem to touch. Like an old general returning to war, he’s simply fulfilling a duty. “Winning Tampa Am when I was 10-years-old is really what boosted my amateur career. And then by the time I was 11, I was skating X Games for the first time, which was insane. And a dream come true. Being out there skating with these guys that I’d looked up to since I started. And then of course winning my first pro contest ever, which was Street League in Arizona, 2010. It was the first ever Street League contest.”

It was at this time that Huston was dealing with a lot of bad noise on the family front. His mother had just won custody of him from his father, and moved him back to Orange County, reuniting him with his siblings and getting his prodigious career back on track. The family was broke at the time, and though Huston was invited to SLS, they couldn’t afford the trip. In a Hail Mary attempt, his mother took him anyway. Entrepreneur and former skater, Rob Dyrdek, ended up paying for their expenses, and Huston won, earning himself $150,000 and bringing his family back from the brink of poverty. He was 15-years-old. Abra-fucking-cadabra.

“I felt less pressure on myself and in my career, because I hadn’t even won a pro contest yet. I was dealing with a lot of family stuff and with sponsors. I didn’t really even have a proper shoe or board sponsor at the time. So I was just going out there kind of like the underdog. Just to see if I could win this thing. And I think I knew within myself that I had the talent and the tricks to win it. I just needed to go out there and make it happen. And that’s what I did.”

The newly established SLS and Huston’s landmark victory became a touchstone for a new generation of skaters, and what was possible. Older and more weathered skaters, though, jaded from the fame antics of Ryan Sheckler and Bam Margera, tend to talk up the purity of skating and put down the sellout nature of contests. And self-described “hesh” skaters from LA to SF tell me Nyjah Huston isn’t even on their radar. While it’s true that everyone has their own reasons for skating, and while it’s true contest skating may not be as unquantifiable or Zen as hill-bombing, all these purists probably never had to land tricks to feed their families. And it’s hard to be on anyone’s radar when your rep has gone beyond stratospheric—exospheric. While others have been grinding on the moon, he’s been on Mars.

Up to now, Huston’s competitive streak has been unmatched, his precision as awesome and uncatchable as a tic-tac UFO. The Olympic draw in the suspended year of 2020, however, leaned on more than just superhuman feats of physicality. Drama abounded in Tokyo: the sexual assault controversy within America’s fencing team; the first trans woman competing in weightlifting; the state of Simone Biles’s mental health; the quasi-presence of the “Russian Olympic Committee” in the wake of the doping scandal and on and on. On the other hand, the California sports of skating and surfing seemed unaffected, even impervious to drama and—as it turned out—even defeat.

David Foster Wallace described great athletes as “profundity in motion.” The ones who make abstractions like power, grace, and control “not just incarnate but televisable.” That may continue to be the case with skateboarding, which fans watch with all the fervor of a NASCAR crowd—as enthralled with watching their favorites crash and burn as they are with watching them stick tricks.

The Olympics didn’t even yield gnarly spills though, and dazzling sleights-of-hand came from maybe one or two athletes. Certainly, the main skateboarding events suffered from a downsized crowd, lacking the energy the event would’ve otherwise generated. Much to the world’s surprise, the US team on both sides underperformed.

In the finals, Jagger Eaton was the only American who kept it close and carved out a lead, forcing Japan’s Yuto Horigome to give a flawless performance and take the gold. Huston repeatedly attempted a cab flip back lip, but couldn’t stick it once. When it was all said and done, Eaton took home the bronze in Street, and Cory Juneau nabbed the bronze in Park. The much-hyped Nyjah Huston didn’t even make it to the podium.

So, what does that say? About him? About his legacy? About his prowess as the reigning Colossus of Clout? Not much, as it turns out.“We all want to medal,” Hawaii-native Heimana Reynolds, skate park world champion, told Time. “But this is skateboarding… We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Even to the King of Consistency, at the end of the day, you’ve just got to leave it to the gods, elements, whatever unnamed force turns the tides. “I put a lot of pressure on myself,” Huston reflects, “but I mean, I never go out in the contest expecting to win because of the difficulty and the technicality of the tricks we’re doing out there. There’s so much that goes into landing those tricks. It’s very easy to… not even have a bad day… but just have one slight, little mess-up and not land your trick, you know? It’s a constant battle as a skateboarder.”

I’d go so far as to blame America’s sue-happy nature. Between helicopter parents, property owners, and aggro cops, I shudder to think of the number of skate-related lawsuits and court appearances jamming up the legal system across the country. As long as skating in public is snubbed and relegated to designated areas like smoking, the rest of the world is going to catch up. As much of a beacon for freedom as America is, it sure does hate skateboarding and all it represents.

That leaves little excuse for Huston, though, blessed with an indoor skate park all his own not far from his $3 million Laguna Beach mansion and all the backing Nike can offer. But millionaire skater or not, a bad day is a bad day. And it’s hard not to chalk it up to the alignment of the stars. To Huston’s credit, he’s not buying into $40,000 New Age crystals to decorate his home like the swaths of SoCal’s uber-rich.

Though there’s a radical magic to skateboarding and how it shakes out, he keeps his rituals simple. “I like spending a lot of time outside. A lot of hiking. I ride dirt bikes. That’s my favorite thing to do, aside from skateboarding. Being out in nature… That’s where I find a lot of mental clarity and kind of calm the mind, and it makes you just thankful for life.”

The spirit of skating truly lies outside of designated boundaries, and in the improvised art of doing tricks on any surface, any time, any place. The purity isn’t lost on Huston. “I did a lot of street skating and filming last year and just rolling away from some of those tricks. Those are some of the most important moments for me because those are like, that’s real skateboarding right there. Skating stuff that isn’t meant to be skated on, skating massive rails that you could literally die trying, but that alone goes to show how much love and passion we have for this. Because we’re down to risk it all.”

Even with years of repetition, like the motions of rolling dice, the results can still be magic. “What’s magical to me are the moments when we’ve tried tricks for hours and then just randomly landed out of nowhere. A lot of the time, it’s very unexpected. You won’t expect to land it, and then all of a sudden, next thing you know, you’re just rolling away. You’re like, ‘Damn, I’ll probably never do that trick again.’ Those are some of the best moments in skating, the shock of landing some crazy trick. So yeah, it definitely feels like magic sometimes.”

Not unlike catching a perfect wave. And no matter how much prepping, how much practicing you do, the gleaming spontaneity of pulling off the unbelievable brings a childlike glee to even the most masterly. For some, skating is the fountain of youth. “It’s never ending with skating because it’s constant progression—mixing tricks into other tricks and tricks out. It’s endless.”