'She had changed': Did a concussion push Kelly Catlin to a breaking point?
The family of the Olympic cyclist believes a concussion rapidly sent a
life of dizzyingly high achievement into a tragic tailspin
Tom Dart
Tom Dart
“We’re kind of astounded at the number of different things that she did and she did so well,” said her father, Mark. “It reminds me of what a remarkable talent she was.”
The past tense is because Catlin killed herself last week in her apartment at Stanford University about two months after suffering a concussion in a cycling accident. She was 23.
A triplet born and raised in Minnesota, Catlin took up cycling aged 17, switching from mountain bikes to track contests in 2015. The next year she was part of the American line-up that claimed silver in the team pursuit at the Rio Olympics. She also won three successive world titles in the same event.
Last year she finished an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and Chinese at the University of Minnesota and began a master’s in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford last fall. She rode for the Rally UHC professional road cycling team.
As reported by the Washington Post, the family has donated her brain to the Veterans Affairs-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank, a renowned centre for research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain injuries. Her relatives hope that analysis will support their belief that the concussion’s effects spurred her to suicide.
“She was always curious if her brain was somehow different from others, and would have loved to have her brain being studied in research,” her brother, Colin, told the Guardian by email. “I feel that if any good can come from her death, some small contribution to research would be important, especially if it leads to helping others facing her situation in the future.”
Mark Catlin said that after the injury “she had I think problems with reasoning, kind of befuddled,” and she attempted suicide in January, leading to a month of rest and a spell in hospital after which she appeared to be improving. “The suicide note was kind of disturbing and bizarre, we thought, ‘Boy, she isn’t the Kelly that we know, writing this way’. She had changed and it was tough to see and it was a concern to us,” he told the Guardian.
He recalled some of her many passions: Egyptology, science fiction, model horses, playing classical violin, reading for hours each day while listening to German industrial metal bands and eating “tons and tons of chocolate”. Her parents first noted her persistence when she was less than a year old, determined to figure out how to crawl and stand.
“I can say that Kelly was the toughest person I’ve ever met, exceptionally tough. Being a high-performance athlete, toughness is a prerequisite, but she was the toughest. She was the most driven individual I have ever met as well, which again, comes with high-performance athletics, but she set the bar,” her personal coach, Stephen McGregor, said by email. “She was also exceptionally smart and artistic,” he added. “Moreover, on a personal level, she was kind, humble and stoic; personality traits that endeared her to all that met her.”
Catlin sustained a broken arm in a training crash last October. Underlining her tolerance for pain – a trait she felt was vital for success in cycling – she was reluctant to accept an anaesthetic during treatment, worried the drug would show up in a doping test. Then, during a steep descent on a training ride in California, her wheels slipped on a slick patch on the road and she tumbled off her bike.
She would later discover the impact had cracked her helmet, front and back. She had road rash but in typical fashion, her father said, she bounced up and went to a training camp a day or two later, only to endure a pounding headache that left her writhing in pain when she began a high-interval workout. Severe headaches continued and she developed sensitivity to light and a rapid heartbeat.
“I said to her, ‘You’ve just got to quit this, get some good long-term rest, take six months off if you have to and then you can come back to it’,” Mark Catlin said. “But she said, ‘For me it’s therapy, I can’t give up cycling’ and unfortunately when she cycles she can’t give up trying to go hard, for some reason,” he said. “The most she could take off was probably two days without getting really stir-crazy.”
While concussions in American football attract the most media attention in the US, they are also common in many other sports, such as gymnastics and cheerleading, said Taylor Twellman, an ESPN analyst and former MLS player who founded ThinkTaylor, a concussion awareness organization.
Twellman wants to see an increased emphasis on rehabilitation, including more studies. “Rehabilitation of traumatic brain injuries is still way behind the discussion of education and awareness,” he said. “The awareness is there, we’re all having discussions, that’s fine but it doesn’t get you anywhere if no one is putting their energy and their money into: how do you rehabilitate this?”
Missy Martin, an undergraduate and cheerleader on medical leave from University of California, Berkeley, said that learning about Catlin’s death is prompting her to ask for more expert help and resources and advocate for better treatment for student-athletes in general.
Martin said she suffered three concussions over several months during cheerleading stunts and now has headaches, vision problems and light sensitivity. “People can’t see concussions so I think that’s why it’s difficult to understand it. With a broken leg you see the cast, the crutches, the person’s limping,” she said. “I can’t go to movie theaters, I can’t be in loud restaurants, I can’t be out with my friends and go dance to music, so I can’t do everyday things that I’m used to doing.”
The 23-year-old added: “Pushing myself is part of how I got to be successful as an athlete. And when you get a concussion it takes away that special part of you because you can’t work, you have to rest.”
It would be understandable if even someone in perfect health felt pressure from pursuing high-level academic and sporting ambitions in parallel. Catlin wrote a blog post for Velo News last month in which she described stepping off the podium after a World Cup race in Berlin to be told that she would have to retake a three-hour exam. “Being a graduate student, track cyclist, and professional road cyclist can … feel like I need to time-travel to get everything done. And things still slip through the cracks,” she wrote.
“Kelly worked harder than almost anyone you are likely to meet. She could be an Olympian and a full-time straight-A graduate student. We idolize such strength, but in the end it was destructive, burning out when she had not yet even begun to reach her full potential,” Colin Catlin said.
“She had survived, even thrived in this environment for years on her own, training in Colorado for her first Olympics. But it was living on the edge, and all it took was the addition of her crashes and concussion to push things to the breaking point.”
- In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
