At the Rio 2016 Olympics, Catlin was a silver medal winner.
On a sunny day in the coastal mountains surrounding San Francisco, an Olympic medal-winning cyclist was racing down a twisting ribbon of tarmac, descending at the kind of blistering speed reserved for cars and motorbikes.
Kelly Catlin lost control on a surface that had dried quickly.
Her bike flew out from under her and came to a stop in a cloud of dust. She fell several times as she was carried forward across the road.
The drill of the hardened cyclist is to jump up, survey the bike, examine the burning road rash and torn Lycra, get back up and finish the ride.
She appeared to be okay. She headed home. She spoke with her mother on the phone.
Carolyn said that she was laughing when she told her about it.
I asked her if she checked her helmet. She said it was fine. She checked it and it had dents on the front and back.
At the time, she had suffered a concussion. She began to experience pain and confusion. She became anxious and depressed. Her family was worried.
She took her own life two months later. She was young.
She has been looking for answers for a long time.
They believe doing so will help raise awareness about an issue that has been ignored for too long.
A gifted athlete, Catlin was one of three triplets. She was destined to achieve in almost any sport she liked. She was a talented football player, but when she got injured, she took up cycling to keep fit.
She was born with a drive. Her father Mark says that she isn't necessarily an Olympic athlete, but to excel or be good at something.
Anything she focused on, she focused on. She would do it with school assignments. The thing it got into was cycling.
By the time of her crash, she was a postgraduate computer science student, a three-time world track cycling champion, and an Olympics silver medallist.
She was training with the professional team Rally Cycling, one of America's best. She didn't know how her injuries would affect her.
She was still in pain weeks later. Doctors could not tell what was wrong.
Carolyn says that she couldn't go to Germany for the World Cup because of her headaches. She stayed an extra week after the team left because she couldn't handle the noise and lights at the airport.
She went to the Olympic Training Centre and had a lot of scans which didn't show up a lot.
Things went downhill after that. She was put on therapy for dizziness, light sensitivity and headaches. She did eye exercises. They trained her with monitors and blood pressure cuffs. Something was not right.
Team USA cyclists sitting with third person, Catlin.
At the end of January, Catlin attempted suicide.
Carolyn says that part of her brain knew it was too much. She told us she wouldn't try again.
She talked to her sister on the phone a couple of days before she killed herself. If things don't change in a month.
It was almost over.
Mark thinks that she just said that to get out of the hospital. She was going to get a lawyer and the staff decided it wasn't the right thing to let her go.
After a series of unanswered phone calls and a phone call with her sister, Catlin was found dead in her apartment at Stanford in March 2019.
Mark believes his daughter would still be alive if her symptoms were recognised as evidence of post-concussion syndrome. The link was not made because of the concussions that she had suffered.
Mark believes that if it had been, Catlin would have followed guidance to take several weeks' full rest, which would have alleviated PCS symptoms. Continuing to combine her studies and cycling, Catlin had been as busy as ever, determined to achieve, restless and intense in her pursuit of excellence, just like she always was.
The family believes that the symptoms she was experiencing, combined with the complex edge to her personality, proved too much for her.
According to the Washington Post, her diaries revealed that she lived by a set of guidelines which included "I do not cry".
elite sport is often seen as the top of human performance. Practice makes perfect because of the perception that an athlete can't be too dedicated in their pursuit of glory. We think of their resilience in the same way. Many champions have a philosophy called 'we go again'.
Shortly before her death, she referred to this in a post on the website.
She wrote that athletes are programmed to be "sphinx with our pain, to bear our burdens and not complain, even when such stoicism reaches the point of stupidity and those burdens begin to damage us." These are difficult to break.
I don't always make everything work. It's like juggling with knives, but I'm dropping a lot of them. Most of them hit the floor, not me.
Brain injury is not understood in the sporting world. Awareness of the link between repeated blows to the head and chronic traumatic encephalopathy has begun to grow in recent years.
Headway has played a major role in developing interventions to mitigate against risks facing athletes, while also campaigning for wider understanding of post-concussion syndrome.
PCS can be experienced in the immediate weeks or months after a concussion, which is why it is only currently diagnosed post-mortem.
Headway's campaign slogan was 'If in doubt, sit it out'. The reality of the cycling world can be found a long way from that message.
In road cycling, a rider needs to get back on their bike quickly after a crash to avoid missing a time limit and being eliminated.
There were at least one high-profile instances of concussion last year in the men's road cycling season. Romain Bardet crashed on stage 13 of the Tour de France in 2020.
He was in the lead of the race but after crashing his legs gave way and he collapsed. He was back on his bike in a minute. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage after finishing the 192 km stage.
Several of the USA Cycling counterparts have highlighted their concerns over concussions they suffered during their careers on the track, including 2020 world time trial champion Chloe Dygert and US time trial champion Carmen Small, who says her career was eventually ended by it.
"All athletes want to push on when they should probably stop," Small has said. I still have headaches. I was out of it for four days in a dark room and had a bout of vertigo for six weeks, but I was never diagnosed.
USA Cycling has launched a wellbeing programme and a number of strategic initiatives aimed at changing the narrative around mental health.
The Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank at Boston University received a donation from the family of Catlin.
There are some early signs of progress.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a report in July about concussion in sport.
New measures have been introduced by the UCI to better ensure the safety of athletes. Team members will be trained to recognize the signs of concussion, record every incident centrally and follow a set time limit for recovery.
During this year's Paris-Nice, Britain's 2020 Giro d'Italia champion was pulled out of the race after his team opted for caution - a move which was widely praised.
The Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank at Boston University received the brain of Catlin after her death to aid research into the effects of concussion.
Mark identified four areas of possible cause, including personality, stress, overtraining and concussion.
Kelly was a complex individual who kept a lot of feelings inside and kept a veneer of being an iron woman.
She wouldn't reveal her psychical situation to anyone. She pushed herself when she shouldn't have. A very strong woman was brought down by that combination.
It's like we're torn apart. I wake up every morning with a sense that she's gone. I wake up every night and think about what I could have done.
Carolyn doesn't want any other athletes to go through this. We just want to get the right programme to help people before it's too late.
I wish she was still here.
Mark and Carolyn were interviewed by Delyth Lloyd.
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, you can get help from the Action Line.
