An X Games First in Chiba
On the final day at Makuhari Messe, Momiji Nishiya answered a poor Saturday with a single trick.
Nishiya landed a crooked grind nollie heelflip in Run 4 to win gold, and the trick was an X Games first, earning both the gold medal and the $10,000 MoonPay X Games NBD Award.
The judges ruled it a never-before-done. The reward matched the risk.
The contest turned on that fourth run. The crooked grind is a rail trick in its own right; folding a nollie heelflip out of it asks for control at the exact moment most skaters settle for a clean roll-away. Nishiya committed. She held the grind, flicked the board, and set her feet.
She rebounded from a disappointing street contest by landing the X Games-first crooked grind nollie heelflip to win women's street Best Trick and provide a crucial boost for XC New York.
The margin was decided not by score alone but by originality. No woman had stood the trick at an X Games before.
The redemption arc gave the moment its weight.
After finishing eighth in Women's Street on Saturday in Chiba, bouncing back with gold in Street Best Trick made for a return to the podium three years after her most recent previous medal.
Best Trick offers no hiding place and no aggregate; one landed attempt can rewrite a weekend. Nishiya used it to do exactly that.
A Career Measured in Firsts
The result sits inside a career already defined by precocity.
Silver in Women's Skateboard Street at X Games Minneapolis 2019, still one month shy of her 12th birthday, made Momiji Nishiya the second-youngest X Games medalist at the time.
The Olympic chapter followed.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she won gold just one month shy of her 14th birthday, becoming Japan's youngest-ever Olympic champion and the third-youngest Olympic gold medalist in history.
Chiba adds a different kind of line to that record. This was not a run built on consistency but on a trick that expanded the discipline.
With her first Street Best Trick medal, Nishiya now owns five X Games medals.
The tally reads well, yet the manner of this one reads better. She competed for XC New York and delivered points when her team needed them.
The eighteen-year-old kept her account of it plain.
"I'm very happy that I was able to contribute to the team," she said.
Seven years after her first medal, Momiji Nishiya is still finding tricks no one else has landed.
