‘I have no illusions about what this challenge is and how different it is, and how little experience I have.’
FDJ United-Suez
This coming Wednesday, Kate Courtney will line up for her seventh road race… ever. It will also be her first WorldTour event. Courtney, who only raced her first road race in May of this year, is set to make her WorldTour debut with FDJ United-Suez at the Tour of Britain as part of a whirlwind summer of cycling that has seen her hang up her mountain bike to focus full-time on road racing.
Courtney flew over to the Czech Republic in May to race the Tour de Feminin for the USA national team. It was her first road race ever. The experience was a test to see if road racing was something she felt inspired by. The first stage was rocky. The second a little better. She won stage 4, and she went on to win the US national championship road race a month later. Within weeks, she had a contract in her hands to ride for the best team in the peloton.
Life moves pretty fast, but Kate Courtney moves faster.
The move from MTB to road was a natural evolution of her career. After ten years on the World Cup circuit, Courtney had already started trying new things in 2025. Going into the 2026 season while representing She Sends Racing, a team Courtney created with ties to her She Sends Foundation, Courtney felt she was ready for new challenges.
“The dots connect really clearly, but in the moment, I think I was really just following the next logical step,” Courtney told Escape Collective last month. “Each step took a lot of courage to be able to do the thing that I felt kind of intrigued by, or inspired by, or curious about, but that maybe wasn’t the expected path, or the obvious path, or the path of least resistance.
“It accumulated into this new trajectory in this new direction, but it was a lot of little steps on that pathway.”
The first steps
Courtney’s career started to shift near the end of the 2024 season, her final year on a traditional MTB team. She started her mountain biking career at an early age with Specialized Racing, and it was with them she won her World Championship XCO title in 2018. In 2019, she made the jump to Scott-SRAM, where she remained for five years. But ahead of the 2025 season, Courtney wanted to do something different. She wanted more say in her career, so she started She Sends Racing, an independent program.
“Starting a team was, in my brain, having ownership over everything,” Courtney explained. “You learn very quickly with entrepreneurship that, actually, most of the time you’re putting out fires and just trying to get the train back on the tracks.
“Things are constantly going wrong, and seeing that things can be going wrong and I can handle it and can keep going and can keep committing and be really proud of the effort I’m putting in, even if maybe on any given day it feels like a failure or feels like a challenge.
“That really translated to my racing, and I started to be able to take risks and race the way that I did when I was young and at my best.”
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