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Kate Courtney: Top career moments
Learn about Kate Courtney's top career moments and find out why this mountain bike champion isn’t slowing down any time soon.
Red Bull mountain bike competitor Kate Courtney lives by a simple motto.
“Work hard, do what you love and believe anything is possible,” she says.
The cross-country cyclist has embodied this sentiment in her career from the beginning. She started competing at a young age and has been collecting wins left and right ever since. She’s already got World Cup titles to her name and been crowned World Champion, but she’s still hungry for even bigger wins.
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Kate Courtney
In a year full of unparalleled challenges, Kate Courtney revs up for the biggest race of her life.
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Early career journey
Growing up in the birthplace of mountain biking
Kate Courtney is originally from beautiful Marin County, California, at the base of Mount Tamalpais. Given that she was raised where mountain biking was created, it seems inevitable that she’d eventually compete. But for a long time, biking was just a fun way for her and her dad to enjoy the picturesque Northern California scenery. She explains that cycling started as just a way to enjoy the great outdoors.
"I think it was more than anything that Marin is a place where being outside is really valued,” she says. “We have a ton of open space and really iconic views, we have that big mountain to climb on foot or on bikes, and I just remember growing up spending a lot of time outside and on the mountain and falling in love with that. … It wasn’t until high school that I actually discovered that competitive mountain biking existed at all."
Courtney first started cycling tandem with her father and picked up mountain biking almost by accident. As a cross-country runner, she needed a way to cross-train off-season, so she joined her school’s mountain bike team. The more she participated in National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) competitions, the more she was hooked.
Balancing junior championships and academia
Courtney entered the competitive world of mountain biking in 2009, and it wouldn’t take long for the newcomer to make her mark. In 2010, she earned her first national title, winning first place at the Junior USA Cycling XC (cross country) National Championships. She’d take home the gold in the same competition again in 2011 and 2013, the year she graduated high school and enrolled at Stanford University.
This all only scratches the surface of Courtney’s incredibly eventful 2013. That year, she scored five first-place wins and came in third at that year’s first UCI World Cup. She also signed her first professional deal with Specialized Bicycles as she began studying for her bachelor’s degree in human biology. It certainly wasn’t easy to balance both her lives, but Courtney told Off-Road.cc that she feels grateful for the experience.
“I think it would have been so easy for me to overtrain and burn out had I been focused full-time on cycling from the age of 19,” she says. “Instead, I had an incredibly rich academic experience and was able to grow both as an athlete and a person during my time as a student.”
In her years as both an elite racer and undergraduate, Courtney would earn over a dozen national and international first-place titles. She’d also compete in each of the U23 World Cups, which are competitions for bikers under 23 years old. She moved up the ranks each year until winning a first-place World Cup Overall ranking in 2017, the same year she graduated. It’s hard to believe most of this happened before Courtney started racing full-time.
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Breakthrough year: 2018 wins
Kate Courtney performs at UCI XCO World Cup in Vallnord, Andorra in 2018
© Bartek Wolinski / Red Bull Content Pool
2018 World Cup
Courtney competed in six individual mountain bike (MTB) World Cup races in 2018, ending each event with a top 10 ranking. The young elite-level rising star had her big spotlight moment in South Africa, earning a gold medal with U.S. teammate Annika Langvad. The pair won after tackling the notoriously challenging Cape Epic marathon course, with an increasing elevation rate of 27 meters (roughly 88 feet) per kilometer. Courtney would end that World Cup season ranked eighth in the world, with her next history-making moment just around the corner.
2018 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships
In a year that took her all over the world, Courtney closed out 2018 with a career-defining victory in Lenzerheide, Switzerland. She won the MTB World Championships by 50 seconds, securing a win for herself and her country. It was the first time in 17 years that a U.S. cyclist was a first-place winner. Plus, it was only the fourth time in history that an American woman won a UCI Elite MTB World Championship. Courtney described the joy and fulfillment of her first World Championship victory to Off-Road.cc.
“It was an incredible feeling to cross the finish line as World Champion in 2018,” she says. “For me, it was the culmination of many years of hard work and the result of belief and investment from so many different people.”
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Racing to the top with the Scott-SRAM team
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Kate Courtney's winning XCO finish – Albstadt
See Kate Courtney cross the line to win the 2019 XCO race in Albstadt ahead of Jolanda Neff and Yana Belomoina.
In 2019, Courtney landed one of just four spots on the Switzerland-based Scott-SRAM team, one of the most prestigious professional mountain bike programs worldwide. In total, the members of Scott-SRAM have earned 18 World Champion titles and 52 World Cup wins. Courtney added quite a few of those victories in her first year with SRAM, along with an Elite Pan American Championship gold medal. After first-place finishes at three XCO World Cup events, she ended one of her best seasons as the 2019 UCI MTB World Cup Overall Champion.
Kate Courtney at the UCI XCO World Cup in Snowshoe in 2019
© Bartek Wolinski / Red Bull Content Pool
Courtney is still a member of the Scott-SRAM team, and she continues to enjoy the success that comes with being part of the group. Her work continues to pay off — she keeps winning races at home and abroad.
Among Courtney’s 2022 season highlights were gold medals at the Puerto Rico Mountain Bike Cup and the Puerto Rico Tropical MTB Challenge. She followed in 2023 with first-place wins at the American Continental Championship and the XCC and XCO US Pro Cups. Her momentum continued to build as she left the Pan American Championships in Brazil with two more first place finishes on her 2023 MTB season.
As she asks herself what could be possible when she really trains hard, the answer seems to be: whatever she sets her mind on.
Kate Courtney stays on the path to victory
Courtney has proven to be one of the best mountain bike racers out there today. As the World Champion aims higher with every race, she continues to redefine what it means to reach the top. To see her in all her glory, check out the top five Kate Courtney videos — and watch whichever big race she’s set to conquer next.
