Kelly Catlin, who won the silver medal in women’s cycling team pursuit at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics for Team USA, died Friday at age 23.
Catlin’s father, Mark Catlin, told VeloNews his daughter died by suicide at her home in California.
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“There isn’t a minute that goes by that we don’t think of her and think of the wonderful life she could have lived,” Mark Catlin wrote in a statement to the website. “There isn’t a second in which we wouldn’t freely give our lives in exchange for hers. The hurt is unbelievable.”
Catlin was part of Team USA at the 2016 Rio Games, winning the silver medal in team pursuit. She also won team gold medals at the 2016, 2017 and 2018 World Championships, and individual bronze medals at the 2017 and 2018 championships.
The St. Paul, Minnesota native was a professional road and track racer with the Rally UHC Pro Cycling Team. Catlin was also pursuing a graduate degree in Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. She did not pick up cycling seriously until age 17, after injuries derailed a running career.
Catlin also wrote blog entries for VeloNews, including a Feb. 27 entry on how she juggled her interests.
“Being a graduate student in Computational Mathematics is easy. Being a graduate student while simultaneously competing for the National Team on the track is often more difficult,” she wrote. “It’s most difficult when you have to retake a three-hour final exam the moment you step out of the final round of a team pursuit. Being a graduate student, track cyclist, and professional road cyclist can instead feel like I need to time-travel to get everything done. And things still slip through the cracks.”
She later wrote about how important it is to learn your own weaknesses and moving on from failures.
“Now I am going to say something cliché: The greatest strength you will ever develop is the ability to recognize your own weaknesses, and to learn to ask for help when you need it,” she wrote. “This is a lesson I have only just begun learning, slowly and painfully, these first few months as a graduate student. I still fail. As athletes, we are all socially programmed to be stoic with our pain, to bear our burdens and not complain, even when such stoicism reaches the point of stupidity and those burdens begin to damage us. These are hard habits to break.”
After news of her death broke, USA Cycling said the cycling community suffered a “devastating loss.”
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Catlin family. Kelly was more than an athlete to us, she was and will always be part of the USA Cycling family,” the statement read. “This is an incredibly difficult time for the Catlin family and we want to respect their privacy while they support each other.”
If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Photo credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images
