In our athletic fantasy worlds, joy and celebration inevitably follow when we hit the shot to win the championship or hole the pressure putt to seal the tournament. It’s often different in real life. Consider Nick Mead, who won gold with his three boatmates at the 2024 Paris Olympics. “The overwhelming feeling was relief,” he says. “After all the time and the stress, it went our way—especially after knowing how I felt before.”
The 2013 Episcopal Academy graduate teamed with Liam Corrigan, Michael Grady and Justin Best to win the first U.S. rowing medal in a four without a coxswain since 1960. Three years earlier, in Tokyo, he’d been part of an eight-man boat that finished fourth. He struggled for months with that near-miss, training harder—and smarter—for 2024.
Olympic races are two kilometers. So instead of averaging 200 kilometers on the river each week, he and his teammates averaged 280. They tried different oars and different boats. They improved their nutrition. “We channeled our competitiveness and wanting to get better to figure out the easiest ways to improve,” Mead says.
Now married and living in Manhattan, Mead might not compete again at the highest level. “In order to win a gold medal, a lot of things have to go right for you—and sometimes things have to go wrong for the other boats,” says Casey Galvanek, USRowing’s high-performance men’s coach, who guided Mead’s boat to victory. “Their performance was a fair execution for everybody. It was fantastic for those guys.”
Mead’s father, Philip, rowed at Princeton University, and his mother, Carolyn, was on the crew team at the University of Pennsylvania. Mead’s older brother by five years, Loren, rowed at EA and was part of the varsity four that won at the scholastic national championships. Loren mentored his brother while Nick was trying to figure out what sport to choose. Crew coach Molly Konopka was careful to refrain from recruiting him, even though she’d tried to sell just about every other upper school student she encountered on the sport. A strong lacrosse player, Mead was part of the Conestoga club team that won the state championship.
Mead was in eighth grade at the time—and instead of fully committing to the crew team the following school year, he tried rowing indoors during the winter, when the team trained on ergometers. “It gave me a little exposure,” he says. “If I hated it, I could play lacrosse in the spring.”
Konopka, meanwhile, remained in the background, hoping but not pressing. “He decided on his own,” she says. “I always thought it was a good move on his part.”
Apparently so, as Mead met with immediate success. His erg times and fitness levels were extremely high. “Rowing suits me personally,” he says. “You get out of it exactly what you put in. It’s less about natural talent, and you can see improvement so concretely. When you see the numbers on the screen, you know you’re getting better.”
Some in the EA lacrosse community thought he was crazy for giving up the sport. But Mead was pleased with his first rowing season. By the time he was a junior, he was part of the four-man boat with a coxswain that won the city championship on the Schuylkill River. His brother had been part of the last Episcopal boat to win that title.
The Churchmen had a strong boat Mead’s senior year, but the night before the 2013 Stotesbury Cup Regatta on the Schuylkill, junior Paul Pratt, a member of the foursome, was killed in a car accident in Radnor. Mead and his fellow boatmates made the decision to compete in the regatta. They finished second with Pratt’s parents, the EA junior class and several other students on hand. “Paul was one of the strongest guys on the team,” Mead says. “Everyone was in a very emotional state. It was hard to focus.”
Meanwhile, Mead was getting recruiting attention from major Eastern rowing schools. He visited Princeton last but liked it the best. “Within six hours, I knew it was where I wanted to be,” he says.
Mead made the varsity eight as a freshman. As a sophomore, he helped Princeton to third at the national championships. The Tigers were fourth his senior year.
After graduating in June 2017 with a degree in history, Mead put off his job search to try out for the national team. The U.S hadn’t medaled in crew in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Mead says he earned a spot as part of “a ragtag group” that finished second at the 2017 world championships. After coming in fourth in Tokyo in ’21, Mead was in the silver-medal winning four at the 2023 worlds. That set him up perfectly for the 2024 Games. “One of the coolest parts of rowing is blending four different people into one boat,” he says. “We all had huge chips on our shoulders from past failures.”
Last October, Mead married Paulina Orillac, whom he met as a freshman at Princeton, and he’s now working in a supply chain role in New York. When he was preparing for international competition, he was 3,000 miles away in California. Never again, he says. “I still love the sport and training, but I’m going to focus on my next pursuit.”