Nyjah Huston and Jagger Eaton have known each other for a while.

Eaton, 23, and Huston, 29, had been skating together for years until they won the silver and bronze medals respectively in the men’s street skating event at the Paris Olympics on Monday, July 29.

After their victory, the two skaters praised each other warmly as they spoke to reporters.

“My relationship with Nyjah is like my big brother,” Eaton said after his medal win at the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

The Arizona native even credits Huston with inspiring him as a skater. “I would honestly say I credit a lot of my tricks, a lot of my competitive drive, to him,” said Eaton, who finished second to Huston at the 2018 ESPN X Games.

“In my eyes, he was the first skateboarder to really embrace competition. To be out there on the field with him is a testament to what he meant to the sport.”

Huston, who won his first Olympic medal on Monday, called Eaton “such a crazy competitor” when speaking to reporters in Paris.

“You can just see it in the way he handles the pressure and the way he conducts himself,” Huston continued.

“He’s really meant to do what he’s doing out there,” the skater said of Eaton, noting that Monday’s silver in Paris was his second Olympic medal (Eaton won bronze in the same event in Tokyo in 2021). “This is his second medal now, so it just shows how good and consistent he is as a skateboarder.”

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Huston said he and Eaton are spending time together in Paris, during their second Olympic Games together.

“We’re friends, you know. We had a great time on this trip, and also the last time in Tokyo. We had some more sessions in my own park and other places before we came here.”

In addition to their success representing Team USA, Huston said his strong relationship with Eaton is symbolic of the support the close-knit skateboarding community offers one another.

“We all enjoy skating together,” the Davis, Calif., native said. “There’s not a lot of guys that I’m not homies with, and that’s what skateboarding is all about, man. We all enjoy feeding off each other’s energy.”

While each skater is “clearly trying their best” and competing against each other, Huston, who described skating as “the best thing on earth,” said that “at the end of the day, skateboarding is about having fun.”

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