Nyjah Huston: Who is Team USA’s star skateboarder at Tokyo Olympics ?

Californian signed his first skateboarding deal at the age of just seven

He is one of the world’s most high-profile skateboarders with more than 4.7m followers on Instagram.

Californian Nyjah Huston is being tipped for crossover stardom when he competes in the first ever Olympic Games skateboarding competition, in the Mens’s Street category.

The 26-year-old is the highest paid skateboarder in the world and has a string of sponsorship deals with the likes of Nike, Monster Energy, Mountain Dew and Doritos.

Huston grew up in Northern California in a home-schooled Rastafarian family that was strictly vegan, with a Black father and a white mother.

His father, Adeyemi was a skateboarder, and in 2005 the family bought a 15,000sq-ft skatepark near their home in Davis, California.

Huston took part in and won his first amateur contest in 2005, and signed his first skateboard deal at the age of seven.

The family then left the US and move to Puerto Rico to live off the land but when his parents separated he remained there with his father, while his mother and two siblings returned to the mainland US.

In 2010 when his mother filed for divorce and was granted full custody he too returned to live with her.

Huston says that he has been estranged from his father since leaving Puerto Rico.

“He taught me how to be a skateboarder in the right way,” he told the Associated Press.

“He knew there was more to life than just skateboarding. He pushed me. It wasn’t always easy when I was a kid to skate big-ass rails that scared ... me. He helped make me a strong person. There are no hard feelings there.”

That year, at the age of 15, he joined the Street League Skateboarding tour, which paid out up to $150,000 per event.

Now Huston has an estimated personal worth of around $12m, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

The next year he would win his first X Games medal, of which he now has 19, and is the most successful skateboarder in the competition’s history.

At the age of 18 in 2013 he bought a $2.55m home in San Juan Capistrano, in California’s Orange County, where he lived and threw a string of parties, that had to be shut down by police.

And in 2017 he was charged with assault after a fight and pleaded no contest to misdemeanor disturbing the peace.

After that he moved to a $3.6m home in Laguna Beach, California, and he now has his own skate park in an industrial warehouse in San Clemente, as well as his own company, Disorder Skateboards.

Huston and his mother also founded a nonprofit called  Let It Flow to repair wells and provide clean drinking water around the world.

Tony Hawk even joined them on a trip to Ethiopia, where they repaired 15 wells.

Huston says that he has done a great deal of study of the layout of the Tokyo street skateboarding venue.

“I feel like a kid when that stuff comes out. It’s a new toy,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

And he admitted that he was feeling some pressure over his appearance in Tokyo.

“I don’t like thinking that way,” he told the newspaper.

“But that’s the reality — it’s the Olympics.”