Kate Courtney’s calculated gamble

Josh Weinberg, Piper Albrecht

When Kate Courtney steps away from the World Cup circuit, it’s not to play it safe. In 2018, that meant lining up at the Cape Epic, a race far from her XC World Cup comfort zone both geographically and competitively. But racing with Annika Langvad, she didn’t just finish; the pair won, in Courtney's first attempt at the race (Langvad, with various teammates, has won the event six times in total).

Last year, after a broken wrist disrupted her World Cup season, Courtney made another bold pivot. She chose a path few elite racers would: tackling the Leadville Trail 100, smashing the course record in the process, before going on to take the XC Marathon World Championship title.

The story of Courtney’s 2025 season isn’t really about results. It’s about the leap she took, leaving a factory team behind to run her own programme under her She Sends Foundation. For the first time in 11 years, she was steering her career entirely on her own terms.

I caught up with the XC Marathon World Champion as she prepared to return to Cape Epic in 2026 (the race will be held March 15-22), to unpack a season built on calculated risk, a personal foundation she’s growing, and a mindset that’s reshaping her racing at the highest level.

A season built before it was raced

When I ask Courtney to summarise her 2025 season, she doesn’t start with the rainbow bands or course records. She doesn’t start with racing at all. Instead, she pauses, then explains that coming off the back of 2024, her off-season was a three-part project. While race-day performance was always the end goal. Early on, it sat surprisingly low on the to-do list.

“I would say there were like three distinct components of it,” Courtney began. “First was obviously the team side of things.” This took shape as a business operations phase, which started with making the decision to run a privateer programme, then pulling sponsors together, and managing everything from kit design to travel logistics. “I also had to figure out how to hire and manage the staff needed to run a World Cup programme," she said. "There was a lot of business learning curve, off the bike.”

It wasn't a case of base miles and intervals for Courtney's 2024/25 off-season; instead it was spent in meetings and bringing sponsors on board.

That alone would be enough to consume most athletes’ offseasons; factory teams have staff who handle that, after all. But for Courtney, it was only the first pillar. Running in parallel was an effort to grow the She Sends Foundation, which she launched in the spring of 2024.

“One of the big goals of starting this new programme was to be able to give back more and elevate this mission," she explained. “To do that, we brought on a part-time executive director, formed a board, did all these backend things.” The aim was ambitious but simple: increase the foundation’s visibility and reach more people.

Having laid out the first two pillars, Courtney catches herself. “You’ll note I’ve talked a lot and not at all about bike racing,” she remarked. In early 2025, her days were filled not only with interval sessions or race prep like her rivals, but with contracts, sponsor meetings, and setting up the systems that would keep her season running smoothly. It was a deliberate decision that ran counter to how elite athletes typically build towards a race season.

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