Momiji Nishiya Lands X Games First for Street Best Trick Gold in Chiba

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.