How One Athlete Went From Olympic Swimmer to Goldman Sachs Analyst

With three world records and two Olympic gold medals under his belt in swimming, Ryan Held’s new challenge isn’t in the pool. It’s at 200 West as an analyst in cyber risk at the elite investment bank Goldman Sachs. He’s raced alongside teammates like Michael Phelps and Caeleb Dressel, yet when he started his new job this year, he admits he felt a bit like an underdog.

Held, who joined the financial behemoth’s operational risk team in February, talked to Business Insider about what it’s been like to go from spending his days in the pool to joining the ranks of one of Wall Street’s most storied institutions.

The biggest challenge in joining the corporate world, Held said, has been transitioning from a life where his physical strength is his greatest asset to one where his mental strength is.

As he put it, he moved from athletics, “where my body is the product,” to “a corporate job, where priorities are different.”

When he first arrived, Held, 30, said he felt self-conscious about his journey to the firm and the fact that it wasn’t the typical post-grad one. Most analyst-level employees on Wall Street, for example, are in their early to mid-twenties. At that time in his life, Held was busy training for gold medals — hardly a bad excuse.

“It was easy to compare myself to others, but now I’ve realized,” he said, “even though I had a different journey, I was hired for a reason.”

He’s only about eight months into the job, so it’s a shift he’s still making. But one way he has dealt with it is by employing a concept he learned in the pool while training for the 2024 Olympics. He learned to distinguish between “red light” thoughts—irrational fears or stressors—and “green light” thoughts, which are grounded in rational beliefs.

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He now applies the same mindset at work, focusing on the positive, reminding himself that his work ethic and track record of performing under pressure are what earned him a spot at Goldman.

“Goldman Sachs and my team have a vision for me, so why would I doubt myself and them?” Held said.

From Rio and Paris to 200 West

This time last summer, Held had just won a gold medal for the 4×100 meter freestyle relay.

He took up swimming seriously after a soccer injury in seventh grade and went on to compete for North Carolina State University’s Division I team. In 2016, while still a student, he made his Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro, winning gold in the 4×100 race alongside Phelps, Dressel, and Nathan Adrian. He was 21 at the time and infamously got quite emotional on the podium during the awards ceremony.

“It awakes a deep sense of patriotism — swimming for the country and swimming for people you’ve never even met or even know exist. But they know you, and they live vicariously through you. So trying to represent them on the biggest stage in the best way is a great honor.”

When it came time to think beyond Olympics, Held wasn’t initially gunning for Wall Street. He was thinking about careers in urban design firms and environmental agencies because of his degrees in conservation biology and geospatial information science.

In networking with other high-level swimmers who landed at Goldman about the transition from athlete to corporate world, he learned that the bank was more than just finance — there were roles he didn’t know existed in areas like operations and risk.

Held’s team manages the identification and controlling of risks that can arise within the firm’s employees, systems, workflows, and external events. He focuses specifically on cybersecurity. Held liked that the operational risk team gave him a wide standback view of the whole firm, and his master’s degree in geographic information systems shared the computer and tech qualities of his role.

“My job is to help make sure the firm and our people practice good cyber hygiene,” he said. “The most basic examples include using complex passwords and securing your workspace.”

Held said he isn’t planning to participate in the 2028 Los Angeles games. But he still swims three or four times a week at the New York Athletic Club, usually before he goes into the office and on the weekends.

“It just feels nice to work out before work. It wakes you up. And when you’re in the water, you’re weightless,” he said. “It’s a quiet sport, so for an hour you just hear the swoosh of water in your ears, and you get in this kind of zen.”