Olympic Medalist Nic Fink Takes on a New Challenge: a Shift at Raising Cane's in Dallas

Following a fruitful stint at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Team USA swimmer Nic Fink is back home in Dallas. While in Paris, Fink earned the gold medal in the 4x100-meter mixed medley, and silver medals in the 100-meter breaststroke and the men’s 4x100-meter medley. But on Monday, Aug. 19, Fink took on a new challenge — working a shift at Raising Cane’s in Dallas.

So, yeah, not all celebrities in North Texas are hanging out at Dolly Python. Last year, Post Malone made an appearance at Raising Cane's for the ribbon-cutting opening of his own Dallas Cowboys-themed Raising Cane's in Dallas.

Ahead of his shift at the Webb Chapel restaurant, where he served customers and signed and took photos autographs for fans, Fink briefly spoke to the press, detailing his experience and offering updates on what’s next. When he got home, Fink enjoyed a bit of rest before returning to working full-time in engineering, on top of swimming and training. He and his wife, Olympic gold medalist swimmer Melanie Margalis, are expecting a baby in September.

“I knew I was going to take some time away [when the baby is born], and I thought if I still want a job after all this, then I should probably work while I can,” Fink said.

Fink notes that his coworkers have been “nothing but supportive” during his Olympic journey. He shared that he’s still physically decompressing over these next few weeks and not doing too much vigorous exercise. While the whole world was watching Fink throughout the Olympics, he says that coming home and preparing to have a baby is a lot more daunting.
“It's kind of weird having that on my plate,” Fink said. “[I was] swamped in front of millions of people on TV and a big arena — the biggest lights on the stage — and somehow [I wasn’t] as nervous as I'm going to be for the baby stuff. So it's really interesting, and it's really fun tackling new challenges like that.”

Fink said he and Margalis plan to encourage athleticism in their child's life, “but maybe not swimming,” he said with a chuckle.

The swimmer moved to Dallas last year to train with the Southern Methodist University men’s swim team under head coach Greg Rhodenbaugh. Margalis is the assistant coach of the women’s swim team at SMU.

When he trains, Fink said he enjoys listening to Glass Animals and Foster The People, and he has their most recent albums I Love You So F***ing Much and Paradise State of Mind in rotation.

At 31, Fink became the oldest first-time U.S. Olympic swimming medalist in modern history. This came after a disappointing run at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, where he didn’t earn any medals. Fink credits his redemption arc to altering a multitude of factors inside and out of the pool.

“It's not anything that I've changed — where you change one thing and all of a sudden the results happen,” said Fink. “I think it was literally a culmination of all the work that I used to do when I was younger, and how I've shifted and adjusted things to where I am in life. I started having more of a swim-life balance where I was trying to pursue other things outside of the pool, and find balance that way. I think it's a culmination of all these things that elevated my swimming too, and it was very unexpected.

"After Tokyo, there was a time where I was like, ‘I may never go this time again, and, you know, that's OK, because I put all the work in that I wanted to, I went for it 110% and it is what it is.’ To have this kind of late-career resurgence has been really fun. … It hasn't been, stressful [in which] I need to, like, get medals to prove myself, or anything like that.”