Rowing star Justin Best is walking away from the 2024 Paris Olympics with a gold medal and a fiancée.
Best, 26, appeared alongside several of his fellow Team USA athletes on the Monday, August 5, episode of Today before being brought out for a special interview with his partner, Lainey Duncan. “She’s been a part of the story since day one,” Best said of their relationship.
The moment became even more sentimental when the couple — who celebrated their ninth anniversary earlier this year — were joined by their families holding dozens of bouquets of yellow roses. Putting his gold medal in his pocket, Best proceeded to get down on one knee.
“Lainey Olivia Duncan, you are the love of my life. You have been with me since day one. I knew you were special the moment I said — it was the first date — I said to you, I wanted to go to the Olympics, and you without question said, ‘Yeah, absolutely. Go for it,’” he stated. “You are stunningly beautiful, ferociously intelligent, your kindness is leaps and bounds. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t love you. This is gonna be the easiest question of my life. I want to spend the rest of my life with you and raise a family together. Lainey, will you marry me?”
She responded, “Yes,” prompting the Today hosts and Team USA members to erupt into applause. “You have red lipstick all over you,” Duncan joked after she kissed Best in front of the Eiffel Tower. “You look fabulous!”
Best went on to explain the meaning behind the thousands of flowers, sharing, “Each yellow rose represents a day that you and I have been together. Obviously, we communicated through Snapchat. Our streak is 2,738 right now, so there are 2,738 yellow roses from Snapchat. Our love is truly now immortalized and I am so, so happy.”
When asked how he felt about the proposal, Best told Today’s Al Roker that he was “just as nervous as I was lining up for the start[ing] line,” adding, “If I had a heart rate monitor on, I might be, like, 130 beats per minute.”
Roker, 69, told the couple, “Well, this is just your start[ing] line for the first day of the rest of your lives.”
Best quipped, “I got the gold and the girl. And she got the diamond.”
Earlier this month, Best made history alongside teammates Nick Mead, Michael Grady and Liam Corrigan by winning Team USA’s first gold in the men’s four rowing competition in 64 years. Following the event, Best revealed that he used Jason Kelce’s 2018 Super Bowl LVII parade speech to pump himself up.
“We watched it the other day,” he said in an interview clip shared via X. “I had my girlfriend on my shoulder when he was giving that speech, and I’m just like, ‘I’m excited.’ So, you know, all these years later, bringing that mentality. I wish I had a dog mask, ‘cause I’d put that on. Go Birds!”
In his speech, given on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kelce, 36, noted that not many people expected the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the New England Patriots in the 2018 Super Bowl, winning the team’s first-ever Lombardi Trophy. “We were a bunch of underdogs,” he declared at the time. “And you know what an underdog is? It’s a hungry dog.”
As Best noted in his interview, Duncan sat on his shoulder as they watched the speech live. “We’re soaring, flyyying💚🦅,” she captioned a February 2018 Instagram pic from the Super Bowl parade.
