Now four-time Olympic rower Meghan “Moose” Musnicki (pictured at right) hung up her oars after Tokyo, got married and found herself her first real day job at 39—working in HR with a data infrastructure company in the Bay Area. But the siren song of the 2022 Henley Royal Regatta in Oxfordshire called and, while she entered for fun, she and her partner won.
“It showed I was competitive with the rest of the group that had been training full-time,” the athlete told Women’s Health, recalling her realization that she had another Olympics in her. “If I enjoy [training], if I can physiologically handle the stress of it, why not?”
Meghan’s husband Skip Kielt happens to be a rowing coach, and she started training with his roster of mostly male athletes, while also keeping her full-time job. And she continued working remotely in between 7:15 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. workouts when, at the beginning of 2024, she moved back to the national team’s training base of Princeton, N.J., in hopes of making the Paris crew.
And not that it wouldn’t have been a couple’s trip anyway—”He loves me and supports me and knew this was my dream”—but Skip is also making his Olympics debut as coach of the U.S. men’s team.
“This is not a sport you do for the money,” Meghan said. “This is not a sport you do for people to recognize you. You do it because you love it.”