Olympics 2020 Athletes to Know: Weightlifter Katherine Nye

In the lead up to the Olympics 2020, Teen Vogue caught up with some of the brightest Team USA stars heading to Tokyo. Here, learn about weightlifter Katherine Nye, her journey to the sport, and how she copes with bipolar disorder.

What does it feel like to lift 300 pounds — which is about the weight of a baby elephant, or a large refrigerator — straight over your head?

Katherine Nye knows.

The weightlifter and 2020 Olympian says it feels amazing. “It’s definitely very satisfying, especially when it’s a heavier lift,” says the 5’4” Oakland University junior. “When you’re working towards something and you finally achieve that goal, it’s such a satisfying feeling.”

You could see it on her face on the day she won her first senior world championship in Pattaya, Thailand in 2019. In her first event — Olympic weightlifters compete in two events, the snatch and the clean and jerk — she lifted 112 kg, or nearly 250 pounds. In one swift motion, she brought the bar over her head, her legs in a squat. With a big smile across her face, Kate straightened her legs and let out a yell. She’d done it; she’d broken the junior world record. Later in the competition, she would lift 138 kg (about 304 pounds) in her clean and jerk, giving her the win over North Korea’s Kim Hyo-sim.

It was a huge victory for the 20-year-old — that day, she lifted more weight than ever before. But every time she lifts a barbell, it’s also a victory over everything Kate has had to overcome, in a world where mental illness is still stigmatized and women are pressured to look a certain way. As it turns out, to lift that much weight, everything about you has to be strong.

“If you told me I was going to the Olympics when I was 13, 14 … I would be confused as to how.” Kate’s Olympic journey started as a toddler, but not where you’d expect. Long before she had ever lifted a weight, she trained as a gymnast with hopes of one day making it to the Olympics, and, when it became clear that wouldn’t be possible, of getting a college scholarship for the sport. Kate trained hard for 11 years, until, at age 15, she tore her meniscus.

Kate needed surgery; plus, she found that her heart was no longer in the sport. She decided to call it quits. But without gymnastics, something was missing — Kate still needed the type of structure she had as a gymnast in order to motivate her to stay fit. So when a friend got a Groupon for a local Crossfit, she decided to try it out.

There, she discovered weightlifting. Among the many exercises she did at Crossfit, weightlifting, she says, gradually became more and more important to her. Like gymnastics, she liked how it pushed her to always strive for more. “I really like chasing numbers and chasing [personal records] and how strong it made me feel,” she said. Soon she was competing, and with great success. At 17 and still relatively new to the sport, she was already lifting at the national level. Then, she broke an American record at the 2018 American Open.

Kate took her win as a sign — she decided to take on weightlifting full time and quit Crossfit. “I think that’s when I really realized I had what it took to potentially become a world champion, an Olympian, all that stuff,” she said. “It was a pivot in my career from, ‘I'm pretty good at this’ to, ‘let’s make this my career.’”

By 2018, the sport was taking her much further than gymnastics ever did. Kate traveled to the junior world championships in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, coming in second overall and setting a junior world record. Next came the Pan American Championships in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where she won gold; junior worlds in Suva, Fiji (another win), and the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, where she came in third.

Her Olympic dream was back — just “ignited in a different form.”

In just a few short years, Kate had gone from being a level 9 gymnast to one of the top weightlifters in the sport, with Tokyo on the horizon. But around this time, Nye realized something was wrong. She couldn’t sleep, or she’d sleep all day. She couldn’t control her moods. Sometimes she didn’t like weightlifting at all. Soon, a doctor diagnosed her with bipolar disorder.

“I immediately had a picture in my head of what a bipolar person looks like, and the word ‘crazy’ popped into my mind,” she said. “It’s probably one of the more misunderstood mental disorders.” Right away, Kate found that she had a lot to overcome on top of the disorder itself — her self-stigma, for one. And her pride. “I was too proud to get help for far too long,” she said in an Instagram post. “I felt weak for thinking I needed help.” Around the same time, she struggled with changes in her body as she went up a weight class. “I really liked how I looked in the lighter weight classes, so seeing myself change so much in a short span of time was definitely difficult,” she said.

Recently, Kate got a tattoo that symbolizes her struggle with mental illness — a wilting, black-and-white rose on her upper arm. The rose “shows how great and beautiful and happy things can be as a bipolar person,” she said. “But also how dark it can get.” It took time, but she was able to get the help she needed, and to overcome her preconceptions about the disorder. Now, she asks others to do the same. “I want people to not think ‘crazy’ when they think of bipolar,” she said. “Any person with a mental disorder deserves the respect and understanding that anyone else would get.”

The journey toward body acceptance, meanwhile, mirrors what Kate says is “a societal shift in how women view exercise.” At the moment, women are dominating in weightlifting in the United States, and the sport is “exploding.” Women’s weightlifting wasn’t even an Olympic event until 2000. Now, she says, attitudes about how women should exercise and what they should look like are changing. “Women are being more and more encouraged to lift weights and be strong and independent,” she said.

Adapting this mentality for herself was a struggle. “I had to learn to be okay with being bigger than I was comfortable with,” she said in an Instagram post. At the same time, the journey has helped her develop a new mindset that she hopes other women and girls will adopt — seeing her body as a tool and admiring it for all that it does for her, day in and day out. “Your body is just what you live in and how you use it,” she said. “It’s not something to just be looked at. I think that’s really important to remember.”

Next comes her biggest test: Tokyo.

In May, Kate officially made the U.S. Olympic women’s weightlifting team. It’s been a difficult year for Kate — she suffered mentally during the pandemic, and recently came back from a small injury that kept her out of the sport for an entire month. She also switched coaches this spring in an effort to intensify her training, and is doing “the most intense training I’ve ever had,” eight times a week.

Still, she’s confident that she’ll emerge stronger than ever before. Kate hopes to make it on the podium at the Olympics, but is looking out for her competitors, especially from China and Ecuador — their best lifter just beat her at Pan Ams.

After that, she looks forward to getting more tattoos. “I’ve always wanted a lot of tattoos,” she said. The rose was the first step toward having a full sleeve. The next one will be the Olympic rings.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue