Over the past few months, Meghan Musnicki has learned a bit about generation gaps.
Take Gen Z–speak. She gets ribbed by her younger crewmates on the U.S. Olympic rowing team for not knowing what “It’s gas!” means. And while Musnicki can sing along to hits from the ’90s, she’s stumped when the 20somethings on her team talk up Chappell Roan tunes. And TikTok? She winces and shakes her head no before cheerfully confiding, “I am on Instagram!”
When it comes to the American women set to compete in Paris as part of Team USA’s women’s eight (an eight-person rowing team), Musnicki is, at age 41, the outlier. The average age of her teammates? Twenty-eight. Margaret Hedeman, her roommate and crewmate in Paris, wasn’t even in kindergarten when Musnicki graduated from Ithaca College in 2005.
But age (and music tastes) aside, Musnicki has something her boatmates don’t: two Olympic gold medals. In fact, none have an Olympic medal of any kind. But if Musnicki has her way, that will soon change.
After briefly retiring from the sport following her third Olympics appearance in Tokyo in 2021, Musnicki is back in the boat and headed to Paris, where she’ll become USRowing’s oldest-ever four-time Olympian. Unlike other four-time Olympians like Katie Ledecky, she competes in a sport that gets little primetime play and few endorsement deals and whose typical star team member peaks in their late 20s. “It’s no small feat,” she says of her spot on the team. “It's a rare and unique opportunity.”
Going (Back) For Gold
Musnicki didn’t expect to be chasing medals in her 40s. She had spent 10 years on the U.S. national team, winning five World Rowing Championships to go along with the two Olympic golds. When she retired after Tokyo, she wanted to find out who she was outside of sports. “I’ve always been ‘Meg, the Olympic gold medalist,’” she says. She needed to find the answers to other pressing questions: “What else am I? What else am I interested in?”
For a while, her new identity was taking shape. After over a decade of living in Princeton, New Jersey (the national team’s training base), she packed up and moved west, to the Bay Area. She got married—to Skip Kielt, a rowing coach she had met after the 2016 Olympics. She also landed a job in human resources with a data infrastructure company. Her boss and coworkers were in their mid- to late 20s. That didn’t matter. “They helped me transition into my first real job,” she says, “at age 39.” And instead of being in a boat four to five hours a day, she had time to care for her two cats, bake cookies for her husband’s rowing team, and learn what it was like to lead a “normal” life.
There was one holdover from her days as an elite athlete: working out. She stayed fit with daily sets of pushups, running (intervals some days, 6 to 11 miles the others), and strength training, including HIIT workouts two or three times a week. “It wasn’t like I was sitting on the couch eating Doritos,” says Musnicki, a self-described workhorse whose teammates affectionately refer to as “Moose.” (The tag comes from her surname and her sheer strength, not her frame. At just under 6’0” and 163 pounds, she’s certainly not the largest on her team.) “My husband often jokes that I can’t appreciate what it’s like to get back into shape because I’ve never been out of shape.”
That baseline made it easy for Musnicki to say yes when a rowing pal asked her to crew with her at the famed Henley Royal Regatta in Oxfordshire in July 2022. She went just for fun—“Henley’s a big social scene,” she says—but when her boat placed first, it became more than that.
The trip to London made Musnicki realize that she still craved the competition. And that there might be one more Olympics in her. So, with Kielt as her coach, Musnicki rowed in the early morning before heading off to her day job. She got back on the ergometer (erg), an indoor rowing machine, for 90 minutes a day. That December, she took a physical assessment test required of all potential national team members. “It showed I was competitive with the rest of the group that had been training full-time,” Musnicki recalls. And it set aside any doubts about whether to pursue the team for Paris, which would be selected by April 2024. “If I enjoy [the training], if I can physiologically handle the stress of it,” she told herself, “why not?”
Kielt, on the other hand, could see how another cycle of training might disrupt their lives. “You know what it takes—the time, the mental toll, the physical toll,” he says of the commitment an Olympic athlete must make. The couple often found themselves in debates about the merits of going for it. “It challenges your relationships,” he adds, “with time away from home and pushing everyday life down the road.”
Still, together, they made it happen. “There was no way he was going to tell me I couldn’t do it,” Musnicki says. “He loves me and supports me and knew this was what I wanted to do. It was my dream.”
For the next year, Musnicki tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy. She stayed in the Bay Area, worked her full-time job, and trained with Kielt and his rowers, who were mostly men seeking their own Olympic berths. It was not until the beginning of 2024 that she moved back to Princeton to train with the 30 or so women competing for just a handful of slots on the national team. She was able to work remotely—squeezing in her HR duties between 7:15 a.m. and 4 p.m. workouts—but had to leave behind her home, her cats, and, of course, her husband.
By April, the risk was rewarded. Musnicki convinced the national head coach, Jesse Foglia, that she was the same Moose she’d always been and deserved a place on the team. “The thing that was the most exciting to watch,” Foglia says, “was just how quickly she could return to not just training at an elite level but competing at an elite level.”
Preparing For Paris
It’s a warm summer afternoon in Princeton, and the members of Musnicki’s team start drifting into the boathouse. It’s dimly lit, yet the fleet of eight-seat boats suspended from the walls is hard to miss. In a few days, the women will take off for Paris, but first there’s one more workout, in 92-degree heat, on Mercer Lake. Another 20 kilometers to match what they already put in at 7:15 a.m.
Musnicki sits atop a massage table, gently stretching and looking out at the lake. She talks about what lured her back to the boat. “This is not a sport you do for the money; this is not a sport you do for people to recognize you. You do it because you love it,” she says. “You do it for the feeling of competing—and training with athletes for hours and hours and hours a day to race for just shy of six minutes.”
Her teammates come from a mix of collegiate rowing powerhouses: University of Washington, Harvard, Princeton. Most had pedigrees in the sport before getting to college. Not Musnicki. She was a walk-on at Division III Ithaca, located not far from Naples, the tiny town (pop: 2,368) in upstate New York where she grew up. Teammate Charlotte Buck can relate to Musnicki’s journey. She had barely rowed before trying out for Columbia University’s team. Buck came to crave the competition and to follow those doing it at the elite level. She first met Musnicki in 2016 when she was 21—and a long way from making the national team. “Moose seemed otherworldly. I remember being a little overwhelmed and absolutely fangirling,” says Buck, now a two-time Olympian.
Part of Musnicki’s mystique was her reputation as a grinder. In 2009, before finally making the national team on her third attempt, she got an ultimatum from her then-coach: Use the summer to slice 30 seconds off your erg time or forget any Olympic dreams. Along with pure technical rowing skills, erg scores provide a clear-cut measure of a rower’s ability to power a boat. Musnicki abandoned vacation plans and sacrificed time with her family to nail the needed time. Fifteen years later, she’s still among the fastest in her boat, pumping a 2-K erg time of 6:37.
Hedeman, 23, who is the youngest on the U.S. team, says watching her crewmate compete when most rowers have long called it quits is incomprehensible. “I don’t know if I could ever do that. It would be so hard,” says the Yale grad who made the Olympic team on her first try.
Despite the age difference, Musnicki and her teammates have found plenty to bond over. Hedeman, for instance, says she turns to her roommate for skin-care advice. In return, she’s been introducing Musnicki to her favorite TikTok videos. And everyone in the boat shares the same big goal: getting the U.S. eight back on the Olympic podium. In Tokyo, Musnicki was the only rower in the eight with Olympic experience. It showed. The team failed to medal, finishing fourth. It was the first Olympics since 2004 the team had not won gold.
On August 3, at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium outside Paris, they’ll look to reverse that result during the final of women’s eight. It will also be Musnicki’s final Olympic race.
She’ll prep for race day as she has for every big regatta: putting on a pink hair tie, a pink pair of socks, and a pink sports bra. (“I’m not superstitious,” she says, “but I am ’stitious.”) She’ll get a kiss from her husband, who, in idyllic symmetry, is making his Olympic coaching debut with the men’s team as his wife exits the sport. And then, like her teammates, Meg Musnicki will turn her attention to the reason she’s there.
“I want a medal,” she says, “and I want it to be gold.”
