Nick Mead Will Always Trust The Process
An Olympic gold medalist and longtime RTRS listener talks about why he still loves the Sixers, even though they cause him more angst than rowing against the best athletes in the world.
If you’re just now learning about Team USA rower Nick Mead, you might not know much about him beyond the fact that he’s a 2024 Olympic gold medalist. You might not know that he’s a native of Strafford, PA, and a graduate of The Episcopal Academy. Or that he’s also a graduate of Princeton University, and just led the U.S. to a first place finish in the Men’s Coxless Four for the first time since 1960. Or that on Sunday (Aug. 11), he’s going to be one of the country’s two flag bearers for the closing ceremonies in Paris, sharing the job with Katie Ledecky (who some of you may have heard of).
But if you’re a regular reader of this blog, chance are that you know at least one other thing about Mead — he’s a die-hard Sixers fan, and a devout Rights to Ricky Sanchez listener.
And he’s not just some bandwagoner who hopped on the train when the Sixers finally got good in 2018. Rather, Mead has listened to the Ricky and followed the team intensely since 2013. When asked about the coolest thing that’s happened to him in the past week since he won his gold medal, he talks about how he loved the shoutout from Spike on the Ricky, and how he got a Twitter follow from Daryl Morey. (Keep in mind, recognition from Spike and Daryl apparently tops being interviewed on NBC and getting to meet Snoop Dogg face-to-face for Mead.)
“Being away from all the Philadelphia fans I grew up with made my fandom intensify in college,” Mead says of his Princeton days back in the Hinkie era. “There’s people from all over the country, and my teammates who were talking s—t about how bad the Sixers were. They were about to set the record for most losses [in 2016], everyone’s giving me shade for my favorite team – and because of that, I just got more and more into the Sixers.”
Mead’s journey to an Olympic gold medal has been a long and arduous one, not too dissimilar from the path he’s followed as a Sixers fan (though obviously Sixers fandom hasn’t paid off in the same way quite yet). Since he graduated from Princeton in 2017 and joined Team USA, Mead has worked four different full-time jobs and moved across the country multiple times, all while simultaneously training to be one of the best rowers in the world. He would wake up at the crack of dawn to sneak in an early workout, then toil through a 9-to-5 job like most everyone in the country, only to head back in for a second rowing workout in the evening. (And yes, Mead says that because he often listens to The Ricky while training, his gold medal counts as a transitive victory for the show).
He did all this while his competition enjoyed luxuries that he was never given. Other national teams, like Great Britain’s, are full-time athletes who are given stipends to train year-round with each other in the same facilities. Meanwhile, Mead was constantly coordinating remote flexibility with whatever company he worked for, so that he could attend training camps that took place everywhere from Colorado to Italy.
When he moved to San Francisco to train with Team USA in 2017, he also had to grind it out as a tax accounting intern with a tech startup. Even though he’s now an Olympic champion, the top of his LinkedIn page first mentions that he’s a senior transportation planner at Peloton Interactive before it talks about how he’s a world-class athlete.
But his gold medal performance this past week was vindication that all the work he put in wasn’t misplaced. Even if the results weren’t what he wanted in the past, he trusted the process his rowing team was going through the entire time, living and breathing the trademark slogan of the Joel Embiid era like few other professional athletes. He embodies it so much that he regularly sends the Team USA High Performance Director (i.e. rowing’s equivalent of an NBA general manager) quotes from Sam Hinkie’s resignation letter.
“‘We must divorce the process from the results.’ I have said that to everyone a lot.” Mead says. “Especially in rowing, there aren’t many chances to test whether or not you’re doing the right thing … you can’t just look at the results and say, ‘Yeah, what we’re doing is right because we won, or what we’re doing is wrong because we lost.’ You have to fully embrace making sure the process is correct.”
If reciting Hinkie quotes wasn’t enough to remind Mead’s teammates that he’s a Sixers’ die-hard, he’s also known to wear Philly team gear just about everywhere he goes, and reacts pretty dramatically to each Sixers’ postseason flameout.
“He’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet in your entire life, but actually all the times I’ve seen him at his most angry is whenever the 76ers lose,” Anders Weiss says, who is one of Mead’s former rowing teammates from the national squad, and a Boston sports fan who loves to poke fun at Mead at the end of each NBA season.
“Nick is one of those guys where if you critique his [rowing], he’ll actually say, ‘Okay, thank you,’ then move on and actually try to see if what someone said is valid or not,” Weiss says. “But with the 76ers? Throw that all out of the window.”
For Mead, following the Sixers can often be more stressful than his own events, even though he too competes at the highest level in the world. When he’s racing, he has near full control of what happens, and a group of friends who support him every step of the way. But when playoff basketball rolls around, he can’t do anything about how each Sixers’ game might unfold, or about a group of buddies always ready to send him tweets about how Karl Anthony-Towns made a conference finals before Embiid.
“There’s something so much more frustrating when you have no control, and you’re just watching and begging someone to do something,” Mead says. “And when the Sixers lose, my friends are texting me and making fun of me – whereas if I lose a race, none of them are gonna start trash talking me.”
Even though the Sixers occasionally ruin his week, Mead has still gotten plenty of joy out of following the team and The Ricky over the past decade. He remembers learning about potential draft prospects back in the early years. He remembers starting out as a Mike guy, before gradually transitioning into being more of a Spike guy as he’s gotten older. He was a huge fan of Art of the Take, so much so that he showed it to his Princeton teammate and Seattle native Harrison Shure, and eventually converted him into a being a fellow Sixers’ fan and Ricky acolyte.
“For the last seven years, most of our texts are just tracking our opinions about the Sixers and what we’ve heard on The Ricky,” Shure says of himself and Mead. “We were both so excited about Harden coming. We sent each other way too many texts about P.J. Tucker, and so many texts about RoCo coming back.”
Even to the teammates who don’t share Mead’s obsessive Sixers’ fandom, they only have positive things to say about him. No matter what team he’s been on, he’s always been one of the most talented athletes, the hardest worker, and brings Tyrese Maxey levels of energy and joy with his consistently positive attitude. It’s no coincidence that he sits in the bow seat for Team USA – the seat at the end of the boat that crosses the finish line first. (In races with no coxswain to act as the coach on the boat, those duties often fall to the bow seat, as they’re trusted to steer everyone through the water during each race.)
“Nick is one of those guys where if you don’t like him, it’s much more of a reflection on you than it is on him,” Weiss says.
After a journey that started with him joining a USA men’s rowing team still well behind the rest of the world in 2017, and led to an impressive but heartbreaking 2021 performance at the Tokyo Olympics that saw his squad just barely miss the podium, Mead’s gold medal performance in Paris was everything he could have asked for. He was confident that his team could get it done, and even told Sure after the race that just a few strokes in, he already knew that the gold was theirs to lose.
Rowing and the training it requires is monotonous. It takes a lot to plug away at it day after day, year after year, hoping that when those few championship events do come around, the improvements you made were the right ones. When Mead finally crossed the finish line last Thursday and accomplished his goal, he was overcome by one emotion, and it’s not one the average viewer might expect.
“When we finally crossed, there was an immediate sense of joy and shock, but the strongest emotion was relief,” Mead says. “It’s like a huge weight just comes off your shoulders. You’ve been stressing about this, executing this one six-minute race, thinking about it for four years, and when it finally plays out in your favor, all the energy and tension just leaves your body.”
It’s how Mead and most other Sixers’ fans will likely feel if the day ever comes where Embiid and Co. pay off all their own optimism with a title. Sure, there would be thrill and celebration, but so many would feel relief over everything else – satisfaction that all the emotional investment poured in, all the belief and trust put in this one thing was not in vain, but actually produced exactly what every fan has always wanted.
Mead believed a whole lot in this past year’s Sixers’ team (mainly because “Spike was actually high on the team this time”), only to be let down yet again. It bummed him out for the next few weeks, especially because he prefers joyous “We were right” Ricky pods to the gloomier, post-playoff exit assessments. But he’s still excited for next year’s team, and he still believes in Embiid, Maxey, and the rest of the Sixers’ crew.
“You have to be fanatically optimistic that if you’re doing the right things, it’s going to end in a good result for you,” Mead says of being an Olympic rower. “I guess it is just like all those seasons being a fan of the Sixers.”
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
Flag bearer! https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/pennsylvanias-nick-mead-to-be-flag-bearer-in-olympics-closing-ceremony/ar-AA1ovSzV