Everything to Gain
Kate Courtney has spent much of the past year doing things she didn’t expect. The two‑time world champion talks risk, rediscovering the fun in racing and returning to the brutal Cape Epic for her new Red Bull film Everything to Gain. What happened next surprised even her.
By Glorious
There are easier ways to spend your thirties than starting over, but Kate Courtney seems increasingly drawn to the things she hasn’t quite worked out yet. At 30, the American Red Bull athlete has already been world champion twice, won the overall Mountain Bike World Cup, raced at the Olympics and broken records. She has worn two rainbow jerseys, the gloriously unsubtle stripes reserved for cycling’s reigning world champions, first in cross-country mountain biking and then, seven years later, over the longer marathon distance. This summer, having decided to try road racing, she became US national champion at that too.
If you don’t spend your weekends watching people hurl expensive bicycles down mountains, some context is useful. Cross-country is the shorter, fast and technical version of mountain bike racing, and Courtney became world champion in 2018 at 22, the first American woman to win the elite title in 17 years. The following season she won the overall World Cup before racing at the Tokyo Olympics. A broken wrist disrupted her 2025 season, inadvertently sending her to the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile mountain bike race high in the Colorado Rockies, which she won in record time, before taking her second world title over the longer marathon distance. Now there is road racing too, a Road World Championships debut this month and LA28 further in the distance. Essentially, Kate Courtney is good. Really, really good.
Which makes Everything to Gain, her new film from Rebel Media House for Red Bull, rather more interesting than a straightforward film about winning bike races. Directed by Etienne van Rensburg and Erin Nell and executive-produced by Courtney herself, it follows her back to the Absa Cape Epic in South Africa, a brutal eight-day mountain bike race ridden in pairs. During a recent Laguna Beach screening hosted by photographer, cyclist and longtime Glorious contributor Dominique Powers, Courtney opened up in a Q&A about risk, rediscovering the joy in racing, building a team, making a film and the unexpected places a career can go when you stop worrying quite so much about what there is to lose.
Despite all those rainbow jerseys, in 2023 Courtney was considering stopping. “It wasn’t about the thing that I was doing. It was about the way that I was doing it,” she says. “I remember saying I either need to change my coach, my team, or my career.” So she did. In 2025 she launched She Sends Racing, connecting her professional programme with the She Sends Foundation, her non-profit supporting women and girls through mountain biking, and took control of the operation around her career herself. She calls building it “the biggest risk of my career”. Then again, sometimes you just have to send it. “There’s really no substitute for going for it!” she laughs.
Cape Epic was not an entirely new adventure. Courtney first raced it in 2018 as a young elite rider alongside Annika Langvad, then the reigning marathon world champion, and her recollections make a very dominant victory sound considerably less relaxing than the results sheet suggests. She spent the week following, learning and operating somewhere around her absolute limit while they won almost every stage and then the race itself. Afterwards, she was satisfied. “We had a clean ride,” Courtney says. “I felt that once we’d done that, I had no unfinished business and maybe it was time to close that chapter and leave it be.”
Apparently chapters have a habit of reopening, as eight years later Kate went back to Cape Epic wearing the marathon world champion’s rainbow jersey herself, this time as team leader, with a partner she had chosen, staff she had helped assemble, She Sends behind the project and a film crew in tow.
Producing was another first. “It was a whole other ball game for me,” she tells Dominique. Even deciding to tell the story felt like an “emotional risk”, not least because nobody knew what story they were actually going to end up with or if there would be enough highs and lows to make an entire film.
Turns out, they didn’t need to worry. Courtney had chosen Melissa Rollins as her partner and the pair arrived in South Africa early to pre-ride the course. During those final preparations, Rollins crashed and ended up in hospital with broken bones. Within days she was flying home for surgery and Courtney was trying to work out whether months of preparation had just ended before the race had even begun. Greta Seiwald, an Italian cross-country rider who shared Courtney’s coach and, rather conveniently, had been pre-riding the course with them, was confirmed as her replacement on Wednesday. The race started on Sunday.
Courtney promptly rewrote her first mental goal: “Celebrate the start line.” She tells Dominique that those few days had felt emotionally strange. She was excited to race with Seiwald while being acutely aware that Seiwald was only there because Rollins had been hurt. By Sunday, simply getting the two of them to the start felt like something worth, well, celebrating.
We will leave most of what follows to Everything to Gain. There are eight days of racing, brutal heat, a feed-zone disaster that leaves Courtney without water but in possession of cake, and a growing affection for Jolly Jammers, the South African biscuits that briefly lend Courtney and Seiwald their team name. You probably need to watch it.
Four days after becoming teammates, Courtney and Seiwald are already cooking up tactical plans, abandoning them, inventing new ones and trying to communicate all of this without helpfully informing everybody else what they are about to do, “we just play games all day!” she laughs. “It’s a lot of fun.”
Just having fun is something Courtney has been trying to get back to. Leadville, the punishing high-altitude race in Colorado that she entered after breaking her wrist in 2025, had already shifted something.
She arrived without the usual expectations, won it in record time and says it brought out “the best in me as an athlete for the first time in a long time”. Cape Epic offered more of that.
“As I started to take risks off the bike, I started to take more risks on the bike,” she tells Dominique. By the time Courtney found herself sitting at the Laguna Beach screening discussing Everything to Gain, she had taken that idea somewhere nobody, including her, had expected. A call from the US national coach planted the possibility of road racing.
Courtney entered a UCI stage race in May and won a stage. In June she became US road champion and a month later she signed a mid-season WorldTour contract with FDJ United-SUEZ.
It meant changing the four-year programme she had spent more than a year building around She Sends Racing, but her partners encouraged her to go. Courtney calls the decision “no bigger example of sending it!”. She is also rather taken with having teammates who are actually in the same race. “It’s so fun racing the team,” she says. When those teammates sacrifice their own chances to help hers, however, Courtney’s response is characteristically unsentimental, “You better train. You better show up ready to try to fight” she smiles. Courtney describes road as an opportunity “to learn again”. “We are fully in the deep end,” she says, “and on a really new and totally unexpected trajectory.”
EMOTIONAL
It is a good place to find someone who, three years ago, was wondering whether she wanted to race at all. “At my very, very best when I was a young racer, I think the ability to just race so violently with a smile on my face and have fun doing it was what differentiated me as an athlete,” Courtney says. “And when I lost that, I couldn’t figure out what exactly I had lost or how to get it back.”
Cape Epic, she says, brought her back to that place, which is ultimately where Everything to Gain leaves her too. Not with everything neatly resolved, but enjoying racing again and apparently rather interested in whatever she has not worked out yet. “I’m curious to see what I’m able to do in the next adventure.”
Given the past year, she probably won’t have to wait long.
Everything to Gain is available to watch now on Red Bull TV. WATCH.
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