Jagger Eaton on quitting park skateboarding: “It was just the right move”<\/p>\n
Eaton has always taken a tremendous amount of pride skating both street and park at an elite level. He believes no one, not anytime soon, will be able to replicate what he has achieved as a two-way skater, staying in the top 10 in both disciplines through two Olympic cycles and netting two medals.<\/p>\n
While last year\u2019s injury surely had something to do with it, he has made the decision to forego park and focus on street for LA because that is how badly he wants to top the podium at his home Games in 2028.<\/p>\n
If Eaton wanted to continue the juggling act, he probably could. But it just made too much sense for him to pool his resources into trying to win the elusive street gold, after bronze at Tokyo 2020<\/a> and the narrowest of silvers at Paris 2024<\/a> to Japan\u2019s Horigome Yuto<\/a>, who defended his Olympic title in dramatic fashion by overtaking Eaton on his final trick.<\/p>\n Eaton tips his hat to Horigome for coming through in the clutch – \u201cWhen Yuto Yutos? Yeah, it\u2019s hard\u201d – but also admits he made a tactical error in his build-up to the Paris Games.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only reason why Yuto was able to pull that gold is because he did that trick in a prior contest beforehand,\u201d Eaton said, dissecting the men\u2019s street final. \u201cSo they knew how to judge it.<\/p>\n \u201cThat trick that I did in the Olympic Games has never been judged before. They didn’t know how to judge it and they had 10 minutes, in the finals at the Olympic Games, under pressure with millions of people watching to try to decide what this trick scores. That’s a lot of pressure on anybody.<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s just a pressure-filled moment for people in the crowd, for my family, for me, for the judges. It\u2019s just a pressure filled situation. You don’t want to put people in that situation under that amount of pressure. You don\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Olympic Games, it’s a whole different contest. It’s like a spectacle. You want to go in there and be a trick-hitting machine without leaving anything behind.<\/p>\n \u201cYuto being able to win (the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest), make it on that Japanese team and then win was the perfect cycle. That’s the way you should always run a contest if you can – you win the contest before the main one so that you know exactly where the judge’s heads are at.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that’s the one thing I messed up.\u201d<\/p>\n Eaton admits letting go of park was anything but an easy choice. Yet it is one he has had to make, to better his chances of topping the podium in two years\u2019s time.<\/p>\n Because Eaton is convinced that’s the kind of commitment it takes.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a very difficult decision because I still love it. I love park and I love skateboarding to death.<\/p>\n \u201cBut again, where my body’s at – I am 25, I’ve been competing pro now since I was 17. I\u2019ve taken a lot of beating and also for a strategy, for the sake of getting a gold medal – like let’s just do one.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean I got two medals doing both. Let\u2019s see what happens when I just do one discipline. Let’s see just that. And so that’s what me and my coach decided and it’s going to be the right move.<\/p>\n \u201cI kind of have to perceive injuries like they are a blessing in disguise, turn negatives into positives as much as I can, because these guys aren’t slowing down. And if I start in my head making excuses, they’re going to run right past me.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I gotta make sure that whatever negative happens, I turn into a positive. And again, I talked to all my team, I talked to my sponsors, I talked to my coach and it was just the right move.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, what I did in skateboarding will be cemented in there forever and I’m grateful for that, and making both teams was the goal but now it’s different.<\/p>\n \u201cNow the whole goal is to win a gold medal for the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jagger Eaton on quitting park skateboarding: “It was just the right move” Eaton has always taken a tremendous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-550246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}