Skateboarding wraps up with only two bronze medals for the Americans.

Brazil’s Luiz Francisco, for example, earned the top spot in qualifications thanks to his series of risky flip tricks, where the feet leave the board as it rotates. One was a tre flip, where the board both spins 360 degrees and flips.

“When we first got here, the first couple days of practice, I definitely saw some tricks I hadn’t seen before,” Reynolds said. “And it really opened my eyes to, like, wow, look at the level that skateboarding is today.”

Skaters from Japan won gold in the first three skateboarding events: men’s and women’s street and women’s park. That should bolster the sport’s popularity in Japan, where skateboarding’s long history has unfolded mostly in the shadows.

The other theme for skateboarding at these Games had been the youth of many top competitors. The event had no minimum age requirement, so five of the six youngest athletes at the Olympics were skateboarders, all of them women.

At the women’s street contest last week, the medal stand had two 13-year-olds and a 16-year-old. At women’s park on Wednesday, all the medalists were teenagers, including 12-year-old Kokona Hiraki of Japan, who won silver, and 13-year-old Sky Brown of Britain, who won bronze.

The men’s events skewed older. The qualifying rounds included 46-year-old Rune Glifberg of Denmark, who won an X Games medal in 1995, before most Olympic skateboarders were born. Another 46-year-old, Dallas Oberholzer of South Africa, was also in the field, sporting a smile and graying stubble.

Each rode as a sort of ambassador to skateboarding’s past; both finished last in their heats and did not make the final.