Hey Meta, Record This: Kate Courtney and the Changing Face of Sport

The people who inspire us don’t inspire us to be more like them; they inspire us to be more like ourselves.

For professional mountain biker Kate Courtney, this idea isn’t aspirational — it’s embodied.

On paper, Courtney’s career reads like a true highlight reel. She is a UCI Elite Cross-Country World Champion, an Olympic athlete, and a multi-time national champion here in the USA. In 2025, she added a UCI MTB Marathon World Championship to her résumé and shattered the women’s course record at the Leadville Trail 100 (by more than ten minutes) on her first attempt.

Those results alone place Courtney among the most accomplished riders of her generation. But what they fail to explain is what it truly means to be Kate Courtney; how she got here, and what continues to pull her forward.

“I think riding bikes is all about the feeling that you get, and that really doesn’t change no matter how far you take the sport,” Courtney says. “That feeling of freedom is still a lot of what drives me.”

That feeling has been a through line since the very beginning. Some of Courtney’s fondest early memories of riding came on a tandem bike with her father, pedaling around their home in Marin. While the bike began as the vehicle that delivered her to Sunday morning pancakes while out for rides with her dad, it soon became something more. It became a vehicle for exploring curiosity and forging connection.

“Curiosity has been a huge driver in my career,” Courtney says. “A lot of it arises naturally, but when you find something that piques your curiosity and calls you in, that might be a good sign to pursue that adventure.” For Courtney, the bike was not only a way to freely move through the world, but a way to make sense of it.

That mindset and deep-rooted love of riding has shaped not only how Courtney races, but how she shows up in the sport. While her accomplishments place her among the most successful American mountain bikers of her generation, her impact extends far beyond finish lines and podiums.

She is a mentor, a leader, and the founder of the She Sends Foundation, an organization dedicated to empowering girls and women through mountain biking. When I asked her about inspiring the next generation of young female riders, she said, “For me it goes both ways. When I reflected on starting the program and foundation, two things stood out to me. One was how inspiring I find all the amazing young riders that I get to ride with. And then on the other hand, it forces me to practice what I preach.”

As the sport has evolved, so has the space where those connections happen. While for Courtney riding may still be about freedom and chasing that feeling, much of that experience is now shared beyond the trail. Social media has become a vital part of the modern athlete’s role, asking riders for more than results; they are often expected to share their process, personality, and perspective beyond the bike.

For Kate Courtney, she has remained intentional about how and why she shares her experience.

“For female athletes, before we had the opportunity to tell stories about our sport, those stories were filtered through mainstream media.” In a space long dominated by male perspectives, women’s stories were often filtered, sidelined, or overlooked entirely.

She continued, “To be able to tell your own story in your own words — to share not just what our sport looks like on race day, but how much work goes into it, and the fact that it’s the same for men and women — I think that really drew people in.”

Social media didn’t just give female athletes a louder voice. It gave them ownership of their narrative and a chance to elevate entire disciplines. But that visibility comes with tradeoffs, often pulling athletes out of the very moments they’re trying to share.

That tension between sharing the experience and staying present inside it,  is one Courtney has navigated carefully.

“For me, the ability to capture firsthand what I’m doing is really important. But I think the way that I’ve done that has historically taken me out of the activity.”

Finding a way to document without disrupting the ride itself has become central to how she approaches storytelling.

“If you need to be free and focus and pay really close attention, stopping to always be capturing things is really disruptive. So for me, the ability to see those moments, know I want to share them, and be able to say, ‘Hey Oakley Meta, record this,’ has been a game changer in terms of my ability to create content while riding.”

For Courtney, the appeal of Oakley Meta glasses isn’t about creating more content — it’s about reducing friction. By being able to capture moments hands-free and in real time, she’s able to stay immersed in the experience while still bringing others along for the ride.

Featured in this year’s Oakley Meta Super Bowl commercial, Kate Courtney’s presence feels less like a branding moment and more like a cultural marker. Appearing alongside cultural icons of sport like Spike Lee and Marshawn Lynch, Courtney represents a broader shift in how sport and female perspectives are being elevated to the biggest possible stage.

“It speaks to the bigger changes happening in sport. I don’t think that when I started bike racing when I was 14 that I would’ve ever imagined that a brand would’ve put a female mountain biker in an ad space like this.”

For decades, disciplines like mountain biking existed outside the mainstream spotlight, and women’s participation within them was even less visible. These sports weren’t widely celebrated or valued in the same way as traditional professional leagues. Moments like this signal not just increased exposure, but a redefinition of what sport looks like and who belongs here.

“To me, it speaks to a really exciting moment where the definition of sport is changing, and where so many things that I really care about are being put on a really big stage.”

In that sense, the commercial isn’t a departure from Courtney’s story; it’s an extension of it. A culmination of years of hard work spent following curiosity, protecting the feeling that drew her to the bike in the first place, and using her platform to share the process honestly with the world.

Courtney doesn’t inspire people to ride like her. She inspires them to trust what moves them, follow what calls them forward, and believe that their perspective belongs at the center of the conversation.