NICK OF TIME: Nick Mead rows for the U.S. men’s 4 in recent action. Mead, a 2017 Princeton University alum and Tiger men’s heavyweight rowing star, will be competing on the 4 in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics. (Photo by Row2K, provided courtesy of USA Rowing)

By Bill Alden

Upon helping the U.S. men’s 8 boat take fourth place in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Nick Mead decided to take a hiatus from rowing.

“After Tokyo, they made a bunch of coaching changes, the performance director rolled over and basically the whole high performance system in the U.S. was completely different than it had been the last few years,” said Mead, a 2017 Princeton University alum and men’s heavyweight rowing star who helped the Tiger varsity 8 to a pair of bronze medals at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) national championships. “I moved back to the east coast and I didn’t know whether I was going to row again, especially not knowing who was on the coaching staff.”

Assessing the changed leadership, Mead ultimately decided to get back on the water.

“But when I started to see more of a system come into place and when Josy Verdonkschot got the high performance job, I think coming in fourth factored in my starting to train again,” said Mead. “It was just coming so close and wanting to get the opportunity to get a medal.”

Thriving in the new system, Mead helped the U.S. 4 finish second in the 2023 World Rowing Championships and was later named the USRowing’s Male Athlete of the Year for the season. Building on that stellar campaign, Mead made the U.S. squad for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics and will be rowing in the men’s 4.

Reflecting on his progress, Mead credits his Princeton experience with playing a key role in his international success.

“When I got to Princeton, I was like a pretty raw recruit; I made pretty steady progress each year,” said Mead, a native of Strafford, Pa., who rowed for the Episcopal Academy in high school. “I came from a high school that has a pretty small team and doesn’t send a whole lot of people to D-1 schools. I had the physical capacity but I was pretty raw in terms of what kind of training I had been doing before coming to Princeton. I think Greg (Princeton men’s heavyweight head coach Greg Hughes) has one of the better training programs in the country for college rowing. A lot of that progress I made physically was because of the training.”

Some of that improvement also came from Mead being a self-starter under the direction of Hughes.

“The other thing I think that really helped was that Greg has a big culture of training on your own during winter breaks and the summer,” said Mead, noting that he made huge strides training on his own in the summer after his freshman year of college. “There is a lot of guidance in those longer breaks of how to stay fit and make improvements even when you are not in a big team environment. I think that is a huge differentiator in college if you can continue training and not take two months off and come back out of shape.”

Another aspect of the Princeton approach that helped Mead prepare for the national program was competing in small boats.

“Another thing about the Princeton program that is really advantageous for making the jump to the national team is that there is a lot of emphasis on small boats rowing in the fall,” said Mead.

“You are incentivized as an athlete to do well in pairs. That was how you made the Head of the Charles boat or made the varsity in the fall. A lot of national team selection is done in small boats so having that experience and needing to perform in a small boat earlier on my career helps a lot when you have to make that jump.”

After rowing for the U.S. U23 program while at Princeton, Mead made the jump to the senior team in 2017.

“It was definitely a huge jump, I think my advantage was my ERG (ergometer) time but I still needed to learn how to row a little better,” said the 6’6 Mead, now 29. “When you are on the senior team, everyone has the same sort of physical capacity. Even when I went to try out in 2017, I knew all of these guys are going to be a lot more skilled, older, and more experienced, and so I had to just absorb everything they are telling and everything the coaches are talking about. I treated it like being a freshman in college.”

Moving to the 4 from the 8 as he joined the senior program, Mead had a learning curve.

“It is a very different campaign to be in the 4 versus the 8,” said Mead. “You don’t have as much agency in the 8 because you have to subsume yourself to the larger group. You listen to the coxswain and you are doing everything that you are hearing coming through the speakers. Whereas in the 4, you don’t have a coxswain. There are fewer people in the boat, so it is much more give or take with your teammates in the 4. There is a lot more conversation between the athletes about I think we should do this or I think we should row this style.”

Mead took his lumps in the transition as the 4 took 13th at the 2018 World Rowing Championships, but it helped steel him for the challenges ahead.

“You can see my result in 2018, we didn’t do very well,” said Mead. “It was probably my worst international result but one that I learned the most from.”

Getting back into the swing with the U.S. program after Tokyo, Mead applied those lessons in 2023 to help the 4 take second at the Worlds.

“It was the first medal on the men’s side since 2017 in any event,” said Mead. “That was a big step forward for our crew but also just a proof of concept for the new system. It was a really encouraging result. We knew we were doing fast times in practice and the boat was moving well. It is always another thing to get to the world championships and to realize that you can go toe-to-toe with the best.”

Being named USRowing’s Male Athlete of the Year in the wake of that success was a pleasant surprise for Mead.

“It was definitely humbling to receive that especially when I came back from not training for a while and I was near the bottom of the totem pole on the team and I worked my way back in,” said Mead. “Winning that award definitely was gratifying after a long process of getting back into form. It is weird to receive an individual award. Any of the other guys in my boat could have 100 percent deserved to win it. I was definitely grateful to receive it but also at the same time had the understanding that I live and die with those three other guys.”

Maintaining that form, Mead survived a pressure-packed selection process that included a small-boat regatta and seat-racing to book his spot for the Paris Games. Upon making the squad, Mead was assigned to the 4 where he will row with Justin Best, Liam Corrigan, and Michael Grady.

The boat got off to a good start in competition this spring as it placed first in the World Cup II in Lucerne, Switzerland.

“I think it is the first time the U.S. men had won,” said Mead “Most of our big competition was there but you never know what stage of training cycle the other crews are in. We got to keep ahead of New Zealand who had come in third the year before and also the British who had won the year before. We made some good progress on our competition. I think that puts us in a place leading into Paris where we do have an opportunity to win this. We are not just scraping through. We, on a good day, can legitimately win.”

The 4 trained hard in Princeton before heading over to Italy on July 5 for its final tune-ups before arriving in Paris.

“We are training two to three times a day pretty much every day, except for Sunday,” said Mead. “We do some easy biking on Sunday. It is a couple of hours in the morning in the water and most afternoons we are indoors training on the rowing machine. We do weight training a couple of times a week.”

In Mead’s view, the disappointment of not making the medal stand at the previous Olympics has proved to be a motivating factor for the boat.

“We all were in Tokyo and we all came short of a medal and our coach coached the women’s lightweight double and they were also just outside of a medal,” said Mead. “We have had an attitude of no stone unturned. We are willing to try anything if it gives us a chance to get better whether it is the type of training we are doing or the equipment we are using. Josy came in and instituted a new training program. We all got a lot faster abiding by it.”

When it is go-time in Paris, Mead believes that the training and that attitude will allow the boat to excel.

“The more repetitions you get, the more this becomes almost muscle memory,” explained Mead, whose boat will start heats on July 28 with the A and B finals slated for August 1. “That is part of the preparation. You do it so many times that it doesn’t really matter where or when you do it. Once the light goes green, you are in the rhythm with all four guys and you are just executing your race plan.”

While Mead believes this will be his final Olympics, he acknowledges that it will be hard to walk away from the sport.

“I think this is going to be the end for me; we spend quite a bit of time away from home and I am getting married in the fall,” said Mead, who is based in New York City and works in the supply chain for Peloton. “There is something addictive about the lifestyle even if it is pretty hard — there is lot of satisfaction in it.”

For Mead, though, making it to Paris has been a satisfying experience no matter what the future holds.