SAN FRANCISCO -- A day after Fabiola da Silva re-established herself as the undisputed champion of women's in-line vert, Eito and Takeshi Yasutoko have cemented themselves as the present and future of the men's division.

The present is Eito, who defended the gold medal he won at last year's X Games by going very big, with lots of spin and flip tricks. The future is silver-medal-winning Takeshi, who is a bit bigger and skating much stronger than last year and, at 14 years old, figures to continue to improve.

Sunday's final consisted of 10 skaters taking two runs each and keeping the better score of the two. The first round belonged to the younger Yasutoko. In the year since the last X Games, Takeshi has gotteng bigger and stronger and it seems to have helped his ability to get really big air. While not going quite as big as some other skaters -- Matt Salerno was getting incredible air before he spilled on his first run -- Takeshi played to his strengths, executing incredibly technical grinds and throwing some new spin tricks including a flatspin with method. He notched an 85.75 and lead the field coming out of the first round. Taig Khris placed second in the first round, throwing a flatspin 900 and a difficult invert on the pull-down coping that no other competitor tried. Eito cruised to third landing all his tricks, including a flatspin switch 720.

The Yasutokos share the podium with Cesar Mora

The big mover in the second round was Cesar Mora of Australia. Mora was fifth coming out of the first round but skated a spectacular second run with big air and big spin tricks highlighted by a huge 1080 to fakie 900 that had the crowd going crazy.

"When you fall on your first run like I did," said Mora, "then you're stressing on the second. I was in seventh or something and I just said 'forget it, I'm going for it,' and I landed the big 1080 which was what I wanted to land and stuck everything else. I'm pretty happy."

Mora's 86.75 was good enough for the bronze medal.

But the second round was 16-year-old Eito's turn to shine. He was getting air as big as anyone in the competition and landed a string of spin and flip tricks. He just hung on to a flatspin 1080 at the end of his run that put the contest away.

When Eito landed his last spin it marked the first time 1080s were landed by two competitors in the same competition.

The brothers were elated standing on the podium next to one another. Although they get along exceptionally well, Takeshi is breathing down Eito's neck and anxious to show that he can beat his older sibling.

"If everything goes well," said Takeshi through an interpreter, "and if I try hard enough, I think by the next X Games I could beat him."

For now, second place to his big brother will have to be sufficient.

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