Olympic Silver Medal cyclist Kelly Catlin apparent suicide

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Kelly Catlin, a member of the U.S. women’s pursuit team that earned silver a the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, has died at age 23.

Catlin’s father, Mark Catlin, broke the news in a letter sent to VeloNews Sunday morning. Mark Catlin said that Kelly had died Friday night at her residence in California. Mark Catlin said that Kelly died by suicide.

Catlin earned three consecutive world championship titles with the U.S. women’s pursuit team from 2016-2018. She also raced with the Rally UHC Pro Cycling Team on the road. In addition to her cycling career, Catlin was pursuing a graduate degree in Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. Catlin recently wrote a journal on velonews.com describing the ways in which she split her time between the three pursuits.

“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.

This is probably the point when you’ll expect me to say something cliché like, “Time management is everything.” Or perhaps you’re expecting a nice, encouraging slogan like, “Being a student only makes me a better athlete!” After all, I somehow make everything work, right? Sure. Yeah, that’s somewhat accurate. But the truth is that most of the time, I don’t make everything work.”

Catlin hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended high school in Arden Hills, just north of Minneapolis. A 2016 profile in the Star Ledger described her as a multi-talented teenager who was the youngest of a set of triplets.

“She is an accomplished violinist who spent spare time while training in Colorado Springs memorizing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, all 35 pages of it.

She rides a unicycle, can sculpt and draw horses with great detail, favors Creedence Clearwater Revival, may become a pathologist like her father and considers a square of dark chocolate decadent.”

According to the story, Catlin picked up cycling at age 17 after suffering injuries from running. She showed immediate talent.

Olympic cycling medalist Kelly Catlin died in her dorm at Stanford University last Thursday, an abrupt end to the 23-year-old's accolade-filled life.

Her family tells NPR that she took her own life.

"Waves of despair come over us," her father, Mark Catlin, says. "She promised us she wasn't going to kill herself."

Catlin was born in Minnesota, a triplet from "the bottom of the stack," her dad says. Doctors were worried about her lung development.

But Kelly Catlin was a natural athlete, her brother Colin tells NPR. He got her into cycling "kicking and screaming," until she realized she could win races. "She loved the speed of it, she liked the scientific nature of it – cycling has all these metrics, all these marginal gains." She also enjoyed the independent side of cycling, "going out and trying to ride as hard as she could," Colin says.

As a child, Kelly loved horses and tried to petition her parents and the city council for permission to keep a miniature horse in the garage, says her sister, Christine. "We had this secret club called the Federation to Buy Horses," she adds.

That love of horses apparently made Kelly a better athlete. "She watched a lot of horse races and would reserve something 'til she came down the end stretch," her mother, Carolyn Emory, says. "This wisp of a girl would pour on the power and outstrip everyone."

But Catlin suffered some crashes later in her career. She broke her arm in October and sustained a concussion on a slick road in December.

Initially, Catlin didn't remember that she hit her head and mainly noticed her road rash abrasions. But the concussion changed her, her family members say.

"We didn't know about the racing thoughts and the obsessing over different things and the nightmares," Christine says. "We only knew about the headaches."

At the end of January, the family says Kelly attempted suicide.

"She had carefully planned it out and had an email she wrote before that she had scheduled for hours after she was already dead," Christine says. "We got it and thought it was a joke for a minute, then called the police."

The suicide attempt left Kelly with lung and heart issues, Colin says. Her family and her coaches convinced her to rest and she withdrew from the 2019 Track Cycling World Championships.

But the incident was far from behind them and she appeared frustrated. "She told me she hated failing the suicide attempt," Colin says.

Colin says she was full of contrasts — able to listen to industrial German heavy metal, then play Niccolò Paganini on her violin; she pretended she was fierce like velociraptor, making hissing noises, and dreamed of being a data scientist.

And she wanted to inspire women in the world, Colin says.

"The greatest strength you will ever develop is the ability to recognize your own weaknesses," Kelly Catlin wrote in February, "and to learn to ask for help when you need it."

I can not understand giving all that up.

I can’t do ANY of those wonderful things....I would be so proud, so very happy if I could; I just do not understand wanting to leave a life of such accomplishment.

She must have been in so much pain to have ended such a gifted life.

R.I.P.