When USA Track and Field team needed a song for an Instagram video, they tapped Nick Sprague's song "Who Ready." It invigorated the East Greenbush dad's rap career.
ALBANY — The Paris Olympics put Nick Sprague over the top as an Albany-reared hip-hop artist and expanded his international fan base.
When USA Track and Field needed an exhilarating hip-hop tune to sync to an Instagram hype video of its top men’s and women’s athletes in the run-up to the Paris Olympics, it chose Sprague’s song “Who Ready.”
With a driving, anthemic, drum-heavy beat and swaggering vibe, “Who Ready” fit the bill for the short video’s headline: “Unstoppable. Unmatched.”
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A snippet of Sprague’s music also was synced to a TikTok video promoting the gold medal-winning Team USA men’s Olympic basketball team.
The Paris Olympics posts helped push Sprague to the next level as a hip-hop performer, surpassing 100 million streams of his music in the past four years on Spotify — plus millions more with other streaming services. The Olympics exposure garnered him new fans in Brazil, Russia, Germany, Spain and other countries.
Two of his biggest hits, “Top Speed” and “Add It Up,” each surpassed more than 20 million streams.
Despite a global audience, he flies mostly under the radar in the Capital Region while staying true to his roots from the Delaware Avenue and Whitehall Road neighborhoods where he grew up, attending School 19 and graduating from Albany High School in 2010.
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With a smooth, flowing, gritty tenor range, his early raps were songs that documented what he knew: playing baseball at National Little League in Pine Hills; pickup hoops at the Arbor Hill basketball courts near........