Right before American Olympic skateboarder Jagger Eaton dropped into the street course for his first attempt in the trick portion of the competition, he pulled out his phone and tapped the screen a few times. Then, he stuck his phone back in his pocket and hopped on his board, where he proceeded to do a clean switch backside noseblunt slide, launching him up into second place.
Sick, I thought to myself. But what was he doing on the phone? Maybe he was tweeting? If I were in his position, that's what I would do. But the correct answer, I quickly realized, was pretty obvious. Eaton, like many of the other skaters, listens to music while he competes, so he was cueing up the right song to rile himself up for whatever trick he had planned. As he explained in an interview from 2021, it's a tool he uses to get into the right mindset. “Most of the time I use headphones to create like hype ... create that aggressiveness sometimes that I need,” Eaton said to the press after winning the bronze medal in Tokyo.
When Eaton made his Olympic debut in Tokyo, he went a bit viral for wearing AirPods during his runs. It's not just him—a lot of the street skateboarders on both the women's and men's sides wear earbuds or headphones while they compete. On Monday, as Japan's Yuto Horigome hit his signature trick, the nollie 270 noseblunt, to secure back-to-back gold medals, he was sporting AirPods. The day before, when Poe Pinson tumbled on her last trick attempt, her black headphones slipped off as she somersaulted. And of course, the other U.S. men's street skateboarder, Nyjah Huston, was sporting AirPods when he secured bronze.
Nearly everyone was jamming out while they went for gold, but I needed to know what they were listening to. When the broadcasters quipped that Eaton was probably listening to country music—a fact pulled from his 2021 post-tournament interview in which he confessed to listening to either Playboi Carti or country—I felt this horrid tug in my chest. That wasn't enough! I need specifics! Is he a Morgan Wallen listener or a Kacey Musgraves enthusiast? This all matters greatly because this kind of information helps me decide how much I root for an athlete.
That's why I have a proposal for NBCUniversal: We need a bug on the broadcasts that tells us exactly what the skateboarders are listening to at all times. Look, we already know that the NBC broadcast is a little gimmicky. Just yesterday, they had a clock on the screen counting down the minutes until Stephen "The Specialist" Nedoroscik would take on the pommel horse for the U.S. men's gymnastics team. Why not lean into it in full, and give the viewers (me) what they (I) crave in their souls? This would create a transformative consumer experience that would certainly raise shareholder value, I think.
Imagine a world in which you get to watch cool people do cool tricks on their boards, and then you discover that they were listening to John Summit. Oh no, that guy just wiped out, but, hey, he was listening to Luke Combs (maybe it's what he deserved).
