She Sends

The first mountain in a sporting career is well defined. Set your sights on the summit, chase it with everything you have, and see how high you can climb. For Kate Courtney, that ascent was steady & relentless.

“That idea of reaching the first peak was really about reaching the top of the sport,” she says. “Even though there are ups and downs at all times, you kind of only count the steps forward in your mind.” 

The steps upward seemed straight forward: incremental progress taking her from a high school mountain bike phenom to elite XCO World Champion.

Kate’s ambition found inspiration in those who came before her. American women like Lea Davison and Chloe Woodruff were racing around the world, setting the standard and showing what was possible.

“I had seen a lot of my mentors be on podiums and show that we are knocking on the door, but I still felt that there was this idea that Europeans were dominant and Americans could only compete,” Kate says. “And it really motivated me to want to be the one that showed that it was possible.” 

At the 2018 World Championships, Kate did exactly that — winning in the Swiss Alps, with an American flag draped across her back.

But the summit is never permanent. In 2020, Kate was ranked number one in the world, pre-qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, and poised for gold. Then came Covid.

“I dropped from first to 77th in the world ranking,” she says. “All of those underpinnings of that kind of mathematical equation of success started to break down.” 

That collapse forced her to ask a harder question: why climb at all? It was a question that gnawed at her, and eventually, led her to hone in on what was most important.

She Sends is the expression of her second climb. It’s the name of her team, the title of her Foundation, and a mantra for taking risks and finding joy. It’s the title stamped across her kit that informs this next stage in her career.

In August, Kate won the Leadville Trail 100, one of the biggest endurance mountain bike races in the world. For her, the victory wasn’t just about a result, but about rediscovering how she wants to race —for the love of it, and with an ambition to give back by rallying more women and girls into a life on the bike.

The same curiosity that once fueled her rise — “this desire to go to the edge, find out what I'm capable of, and to be in a competitive environment that is designed to get the best out of me,” Kate says — still drives her. But now it’s braided with purpose. Performance matters, but so does what it means. Her story now is less about linear progression and more about possibility, connection, and expansion.

If the first mountain proved what was possible, the second shows why it matters.