Two-time Olympic champion Meghan Musnicki has climbed to the highest of heights in her sport, but has also experienced the contrast of devastating lows that are separated by mere milliseconds.

After being a fixture in one of the most dominant periods of U.S. rowing, Musnicki returns to the Olympic Games Paris 2024 for her fourth Games as the only member of her women’s eight crew to have experienced what it feels like to win at the Olympic Games.

But, Musnicki has had to process a lot of hurt over the past three years, with the U.S. missing out on the podium at Tokyo 2020 for the first time since Sydney 2000.

It was “soul crushing,” as she described it, to take fourth place in Tokyo, with just over a second separating the U.S. from a bronze medal at what she thought would be her final Olympics, after having previously won it all at both London 2012 and Rio 2016.

Today, the 41-year-old has come out of retirement to make one final attempt to land back on top of that podium and become a three-time Olympic champion.

“All the women in my boat, we’re chasing a gold medal,” she told Olympics.com less than one month ahead of the kickoff of the Games.

“Devastating” and “soul crushing” are the words Musnicki used to describe what it felt like to go from standing on top of the world with an Olympic gold medal around her neck to walking out of Tokyo empty-handed thinking her dreams of a three-peat were crushed.

The feelings were a dramatic reverse from what she had felt both eight and five years prior, when she stood on top of the Olympic podiums, thinking they were the best days of her life.

“I was part of a very dominant period for the women,” she said, referring to the fact that Team USA’s women’s eight won every single Olympic and World Championship gold from the year 2006 to 2015. Musnicki became a part of that legacy in 2010.

“That’s pretty unheard of in sport,” she said. “A dominance like that doesn’t happen often and to be a part of it, I’m incredibly grateful.”

But does missing out on an Olympic medal become more or less heartbreaking when you have already experienced the euphoria of that top spot on the podium not once, but twice?

“No franchise goes their entire existence without a loss. It just doesn’t happen. And so, yeah, it was incredibly disappointing, I’m not going to lie. But that’s sport,” she said.

After Tokyo, Musnicki retired. She got married, moved to California, worked a full-time job at a tech company, and put her days as an elite rower behind her… or so she thought.

With her recent marriage to California Rowing Club coach and former U.S. national team member Skip Kielt, it was impossible for her to escape the sport, so she began rowing in a pair with Australian Olympic champion Jessica Morrison for the sole reason, she declared, of getting some exercise.

But, put two ultra-competitive Olympic champions in the same boat, and heads are going to be turned.

Mike Teti, 1988 Olympic medalist and former U.S. Olympic Team coach, happened to be one of those people whose head was, in fact, turned. After watching the two train, he suggested that they race in the Henley Royal Regatta – ‘the most prestigious regatta in the world’.

So, after what sounds like it took minimal convincing, the two decided to go “just for fun”, or so Musnicki said.

It was tricky to gauge what the expectation was for the two, as Musnicki was known for racing in eights, but this pair had only “trained in a boat [for] maybe a total of two or three weeks,” she said.

But again, with two legendary Olympic champions in charge of moving the same boat through the finish line of a race, it is hard to expect anything short of greatness.

And greatness it was, as the two crossed the finish line in first place so swiftly that the regatta deemed the verdict of their win “easily”.

“So that’s what really kick-started my second campaign,” she said, laughing when she added: “So I blame Mike Teti for getting me back in the boat.”

The roster for the women’s eight racing in Paris is stacked with a five-to-four ratio of Olympic veterans to newcomers, and is far more even than the boat that raced in Tokyo, where apart from the coxswain, Musnicki was the only athlete to have ever competed at an Olympics.

Between them, the nine women boast 14 World Championship medals, 10 of which are gold.

The 24-year-old Nina Castagna will be leading the charge for the woman as the coxswain of the boat, in charge of not only steering and navigation, but on-the-water coaching and motivation for all eight of the rowers.

“Nina is young, but she has experience and she definitely has the ability. One of my favorite things about Nina is that she takes feedback really well. And she does really well on the fly,” said Musnicki.

And according to Musnicki, Castagna has all of the qualities she could hope for on her quest to return to the top of the podium, including “a level-headedness, a confidence [and] a calm energy” as well as “a great relationship with each one of the athletes in terms of knowing what buttons to push to get them to respond the way they want to respond”.

The Olympic veteran is confident in her team’s skill and preparation, hoping to go through Paris “enjoying the process of what I’m doing. Enjoying training with this amazing group of women and pushing ourselves every day and seeing how high we can raise the bar and how much we can demand from ourselves”.

She added: “All I really want is to show up on race day and for us to put our best race out there… obviously, if you win, that’s incredible, but if I come away and every other woman in our boat can come away with the feeling that that was the best race that we could put together, that we performed to our ability and we capitalized on that opportunity, I think that is what I would deem a success.”

First appeared on Olympics.com on 24 July 2024, written by Sam Peene.