The skateboarder Jagger Eaton made his Olympic debut in 2021, at the Tokyo Games, where he brought home a bronze medal in the street competition. This time around, he told GQ he was ready to upgrade that to a gold. And in yesterday's street final he was set to win—until some last minute heroics from Japanese skater Yuto Horigome pushed him into second place. A silver medal is nothing to sneeze at, of course. And Eaton will get another chance to stand on the top of the podium when he competes in next week's park competition.
Before the games, Eaton spoke with GQ about his preparation and mindset heading to Paris. “I love knowing that I’ve got a real good shot at gold,” he said. “I feel like I didn't have that sort of mentality going into Tokyo just because of where my ankle was and where my skills were, but now I feel like I'm really just ready for gold.”
Eaton’s confidence has been earned through years of discipline. He started competing in the X Games at age 11, which made him the youngest ever at the time—a record previously held by fellow Team U.S.A. member Nyjah Huston. More recently, Eaton snagged a gold medal at the 2023 World Championship competition in the park category. And while that’s all fine and well, his sights are currently set firmly on the Olympics.
He also told GQ about his partnership with Rizz, an app that allows you to get your friends’ real-time takes on your romantic interactions, and more about learning from his skateboarding idols—who just so happen to also be his teammates.
Jagger Eaton: It is a daunting thing. The Olympic Games is the biggest deal in sports ever. It is a daunting task, but it is all about perception. I'm very, very excited, and I feel like I always do a very good job in being delusionally positive. I'm just a grand optimist and I love having fun—I love competing for my country. I love going out there getting medals. I also love knowing that I’ve got a real good shot at gold—that's really nice to know. I feel like I didn't have that sort of mentality going into Tokyo just because of where my ankle was and where my skills were, but now I feel like I'm really just ready for gold.
I mean, it's all attack fuel, you know? I love it. I love knowing who the big competition is. It’s always going to be Japan. Japan's always definitely going to be the boys that we're going to go against, for sure.
It's just fun and I love it. I mean, it's hard because I'm a little nuts on that side of it, like, I live there. I live in the attack fuel, and I love it. That's my motivation. At this level, I've competed with these guys now for eight years, nine years straight, and the last year and a half has been really strict competition. So I know exactly what these guys are going to do. I know there's some new tricks that are going to be developed, and I got some new stuff in the bag. So really, it's going to come down to who can hit.
I just don't really take it too seriously. I'm intense and I love competition, but the truth is, I go in there prepared and ready to do what my job is. I don't overthink it, I just go and I do my job.
You know, I think that skateboarding may be the first and only thing in my life that I don't overthink. It's like, I go and I commit and I train right, and then I go and execute right. Have I over-thought in the past? Yes. When you're a kid I feel like the biggest problem with competing is that you're still learning emotional intelligence: how to deal with pressure, how to deal with training, how to deal with it when you start making a little bit of money and how to deal with managing it, and managing all these other things, right? So when you get those down, it makes competing much easier. But for me, competing is where I belong. I belong in the fight. I belong with the jersey in my bag going for gold. That really feels like where I’m comfortable.
I mean, the routine is the same routine I've had for a year now—nothing really changes. It's funny because I get these questions and I think everybody expects me to have, like, some dramatic answer like, Oh yeah, I'm eating only protein. That's not what I'm doing. I'm actually eating more dessert now than I was before because I'm prepared, you know? So now it's like I'm able to just go and have fun.
Breakfast consists of caffeine, so Red Bull, and a little bit of food. Most of the time it's protein-rich, but pretty carb dense too. For me, it's always eggs and pancakes. It's my favorite.
Eighty percent of the time lunch is Chipotle, just because it's right next to where I skate. I get rice, beans, chicken—I get everything I need. Maybe I’ll get some carbs and get a burrito. And then I go back to skate again, and then I am on the golf course.
Most of the time for dinner it's lean meat and carbs. Lately it's been like pasta and chicken, or it's been sushi—just all sorts of things that are just lean. It's funny, because I feel like a lot of people think our diets as athletes is really just protein or like really healthy food, but it's all carbs. All I'm trying to do is just eat carbs all day because as much as I'm active, there's like, no amount of carbs I can eat to keep me sustained.
So I do three days on, one day off for my training schedule. The days that I'm training, I'm up around like 6:30 a.m., then the other days I'll sleep in until like 8:15.
Training is exactly what I've been doing now over the last six months. I mean, going into the contest that I had before Budapest, I won in street. Then in Budapest I had a good showing, so I know what I'm doing is working.
So what my training schedule like is—I skate most the time. I work out from 9:30 to 11 a.m. with my trainer Paul Hiniker, who's one of the best in the world. Paul's stuff is all body weight and mobility stuff. So it's all like active flexibility. With weights, it's nothing crazy. It's really just making my body feel the best that it can for skate.
Then when I skate, I skate for about an hour to an hour and a half. Then I take a break, and then I may skate again depending on how that first session went. It all depends on how the sessions go, and what the sessions consist of is basically certain tricks I want to add at the Games and basically keeping everything tuned up.
The first 15 minutes of me skating is just me doing flip tricks and warming up. I like to have fun. I'll blast music to my headphones and just, you know, get into the vibe of skating hard. Especially for training right now, every day is a go day. There's no down days. Every day you're training, you're skating the biggest obstacle in the park, and you're doing the tricks you're gonna do in the Games so you're always kind of pushed to that fear. That's why that music is so important. Like, when I'm blasting music, I'm just in it. You know, I get immediately pumped up and fired up.
I've always felt like I'm an athlete and I just can't turn it off, you know what I mean? I always felt like that. Five months ago I was doing an assignment that was a lot more about getting numbers on something small, and then one day a week I would do it on something big.
Now, it's three days doing it all on something big. As I've gotten further into my training, it's gotten to the point where it's all just real stuff. It's not me doing reps on something smaller. I'm this close to the Games, so I just want to get in the park and go. I want to be able to simulate that pressure every day. So I'm just locked in and comfortable with that.
I'm gonna be honest with you, I've traveled so much these last few months that I'm like all over the place still. Plus, flying Delta One out there is so mellow and seamless. I literally fall asleep and when I wake up I'm in the time zone.
I don't really need to stay there for a few days, you know? I can kind of just get there. Plus, the Olympic Village is the best place to be. You have everything you've ever wanted in the Olympic Village. You have food 24/7, you have the best PTs around you. You have new clothes and the vibes are great. You have all your friends. Like, it's the easiest place to be.
My favorite part about the Olympic Games, or the Olympic Village, is that skateboarding has never been a team sport, but you're able to stay with the guys and like, be there.
I'm such a fan of Nyjah and Chris, you know what I mean? Like, I rode for Plan B with Chris Joslin forever, and I was there when he turned pro. And I grew up watching Nyjah win. So I get to share a room with these boys and pick their brains and kind of be like the little brother. Just to be able to like, mess with them and just hang out—that to me is the best. That's the best part of the whole Olympic games.
Oh my goodness. Well, considering how gnarly they both are, I feel like the one thing that I wouldn't say they told me, but that I've noticed, is that there’s just a different level of commitment with Nyjah and Chris. They are the veterans on the team and they’re the veterans in skateboarding now.
What they've done in their careers is amazing, like what they've done in the streets is unbelievable. The difference between street skateboarding and park skateboarding—when you're in L.A., just downtown, no one has done that, or been there, or skated the way you are, and they just do it. They have really pioneered the way that you commit on a skateboard. Those boys have done stuff that is just absolutely ridiculous. I sit there and fan out about them all the time and they tell me to shut up, but I'm like, you guys are ridiculous!
Just that as you get older—like, I'm 23 years old now—and as you get older, you kind of just notice that there is a different level of commitment from these guys because of how much they've gone through and how much they know about skateboarding.
Depending on the injury and whether it's severe or not, you’ve kind of just got to push through it. I mean, I've had all the injuries. I've had ankles and hips and knees and head injuries and all of that. So really, you just push through it, you know, you try not to think about it, and you just try to be positive. You commit to every trick that you do with full intent, and hopefully it goes your way.
It's amazing and I'm grateful to say that my family had a big part in that. When I was younger, my parents owned a gymnastics gym. When I was four and my older brother was six, we fell in love with skateboarding, and my dad decided to start building these ramps in the back parking lot of the gym.
That turned into parents asking if they could put one of their kids in skateboarding lessons while the other one was doing gymnastics. My dad decided to just build a center for it, and we built a full skate park there, and now we have six facilities—five of them are in Arizona, and one of them is in Salt Lake. We do skateboarding and tons of other stuff—it's basically all about the basic body awareness for children at a young age. You go there and have fun. There's air mats and airbags and skate parks. It's just a place to go and have fun.
A great example is my little brother Bowie, who's, oh gosh, think he's eight now—I've watched him fall in love with skateboarding. This last year and a half or two years he’s just fallen in love. I’ve realized and taken a deep appreciation for the wonder of skateboarding.
You know, it's the one thing you do when you're young where you get on your board and you're just like no one can tell me how to do this. I'm gonna figure it out myself. It's exciting and fun. Seeing him have a group of other little kids that he loves skating with, it's just amazing. That has given me a really deep appreciation of skateboarding recently. You know, when you're training for the Olympic Games you can lose sight of that because you're trying to perfect it. Most of the time, in perfection, you lose your mind.
But with my little brother, he's just falling in love with it, and he's just enjoying it so much, and just experiencing the wonder of skateboarding. It’s just exciting and I love to skate with him and watching him—he gets me fired up because of how much he wants to talk to me about it. It's really special.
Rizz came up really organically. Some of my friends were on it and I got on it too. We just started talking on it, and it's hilarious. Also, my friends need help with game, so the help with the one-liners really helps them. They also probably think I needed the help too.
I'm grateful and I'm excited. I'm ready to go get that damn gold. It’s time.