Photo courtesy of ROW2K.com
“There are people out there saying the U.S. isn’t going to do it… They say Justin Best’s too small, Liam Corrigan can’t do it, Mike Grady’s all over the place, Nick Mead’s too big… Their coach is just a high school coach…. It’s the whole team, it’s the whole team.”
That’s what many in the rowing world were saying about Team USA before the 2024 Paris Olympics. The criticisms weren’t easy to hear, but they galvanized Justin Best (BS business and engineering ’19) and his crew, who recited them before their first heat in the 2024 Paris Olympics men’s four rowing competition. Philadelphia football fans may recognize similarities to the cadence of Jason Kelce’s famous, light-your-blood-on-fire Super Bowl Parade speech from 2018, when the Eagles center reminded the world that hungry dogs run faster, that underdogs can win it all. Before taking to the water, Best and his team rewatched that famous speech.
“That part where he [Kelce] is running down the whole organization and all the reasons why people said they couldn’t do what they did, we watched that and it motivated us,” Best recalls. “You need a rallying cry like that.”
Best, who rowed for Drexel from 2015 to 2019, made history with his teammates and won the first gold medal in 60 years for Team USA in the men’s four boat on Aug. 1.
Team USA was leading late in the race when the New Zealand boat made a move to try to gain ground back. Team USA’s stroke seat made the call to go — now. They knew no one could catch them when they kicked it into high gear. They pulled away and won.
No matter how many times he’d imagined it, there’s nothing like the gold medal moment, Best says.
“It was a moment where I’ve climbed the mountain, and now I get to look down on the valley,” he says. “The only emotional response is to smile and cry, and now millions of people know I have an ugly crying face.”
Those years of dreams began when Best was 14, after he got hooked on rowing while at summer camp. He attended Unionville High School in Pennsylvania and helped found a rowing team to compete in local rowing clubs.
He was recruited by Paul Savell and Nick Baker, the head coach and former assistant coach, respectively, for Drexel Rowing, in his junior year of high school. Once at Drexel, he rowed in the four and eight boats, earning team and individual wins in the Murphy Cup, the Henley Royal Regatta, the Dad Vail Regatta and others, plus multiple visits to the IRA National championships.
Best put in work outside of the water, too. He was on the spring-summer co-op cycle, and Coach Savell would make sure his student-athletes were off the water by 8:30 a.m. so they could make it to work. One of Best’s co-ops was at PECO, so he would ride his bike down Boathouse Row and along the Schuylkill River Trail to get to the Center City office. He would be back at the boathouse at 5 p.m.
“Everyone at Drexel seems to find their own way of maximizing what they want to do, and I think it’s an industrious place where you blaze your own trail, and there are a lot of students that are scrappy,” Best says. “You’re surrounded by these people, and it teaches you a lot … what I didn’t know was that was going to train me in the tricks of the trade for rowing for the national team years later.”
He put to use what he learned juggling a full-time job with serious athletic drive after graduating and starting his career. Best moved to the Bay Area in 2020 to try to make the team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The Tokyo Olympics were delayed a year by the pandemic, but Best and his three 2024 teammates made the eight-man boat, which was the top boat at the time for Team USA. Unfortunately, that Olympic cycle ended in heartbreak. The team finished fourth — just out of medal position. Best turned that heartbreak into motivation and later made the Paris team for the four-man boat with his Tokyo teammates.
“We were still hungry,” Best says. “We wanted to go for more. I think that buy-in is something that’s tough to experience artificially. You have to go through those feelings, those emotions, and kind of learn what defeat is before you can actually entertain the possibility of victory.”
After winning gold this year, Best attended a few other Olympic events and watched other athletes’ dreams come true. But mostly, he wandered around Paris, feeling the energy of the city and of the Games — with his new fiancée, Lainey Duncan, a 2020 fashion design graduate who was on the Drexel Dance Team during her time as a Dragon.
Best proposed to his fiancée, Lainey Duncan, live on NBC’s “Today Show” four days after winning Olympic gold.
You might have seen Best and his fiancée’s proposal. It happened live on NBC’s “Today Show” four days after Best won a gold medal. He thinks Duncan knew he would pop the question during their time in France, gold medal or not, but he was still able to surprise her.
Best and Duncan, who have been dating since they became dance partners during their high school rendition of “West Side Story” in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, have also kept up a streak of sending each other a Snapchat every day for about seven and a half years. Last summer, Snapchat contacted Best to share that the couple has one of the longest streaks on the app. When Best informed the company that he planned to propose in Paris, Snapchat helped make it magical by sending the show’s set 2,738 yellow roses, one for each day of their streak. The proposal was, of course, accepted.
No word yet on if the wedding will be decked out in blue and gold, but it will be in a fitting venue: the Waterworks near Boathouse Row. Best will be taking the next year off from international competition to focus on wedding planning and his job in investment banking. He’s not ruling out getting back on the water for the Olympic Games in 2028, but that’s a future decision.
“It’s a huge sacrifice to win; and I’m glad that I made it, and it was successful, but now I’ve done it,” Best says. “You can’t write a better ending than that.”