An unexpected life: The rise and fall of Beth Coats

In her Skyland apartment, Beth Coats is surrounded by pieces of her past: a picture taken from the face of El Capitan on the mantle, a magazine featuring her on the coffee table.

They serve as sometimes-painful reminders of what once was Coats’ life, traveling the world at a frenetic pace in pursuit of athletic achievement. They remind her that anything is possible, even the unexpected.
In the late 1980s, Coats started to lay the foundation for the next decade of her life as an elite athlete. She found and fell in love with Crested Butte on a weekend ski trip from New Mexico and enrolled in Western State College the next year.
It was a move that gave her roots and put her in a place where the tools she needed to achieve her potential were at hand.
In her first year at Western, Coats was convinced by several ski team coaches to try out for the cross-country ski team. With a lesson from a friend that gave her the proper skills, she made the team, then qualified to travel to competitions. By the end of her first season racing, she was selected as an All-American and had Olympic dreams.
Over the next few years, those dreams morphed toward reality. A friend taught her to shoot a .22 caliber rifle and she took up the biathlon.
Biathlon came to Coats much like cross-country skiing had: quickly and easily. After being invited to train with a group of up and coming collegiate athletes, including Olympic biathlete Josh Thompson, she made the national team and made plans to travel to Bulgaria to compete in the 1989 World University Games.
Coats’ Olympic dreams came true after competing with the National Team and joining the National Guard in 1993. As a member of both, Coats automatically qualified to be on the Army’s biathlon team and in the winter of 1994 she was headed to the Olympics and two weeks later to the World Cup, where she earned a silver medal.
Not only had the National Guard given her an opportunity to elevate her biathlon game to the top levels in the world, it had given her enough time and financial stability to turn her focus in the summer from working to riding her mountain bike.
Although Coats had been mountain biking for a number of years to stay in shape when she couldn’t ski, the summer after her Olympic debut she was able to start racing. With some nonchalance, she says it was just another way she could travel across the land on her own power, which is what she loved to do. But in her first year racing she landed a modest contract for sponsorship.
The next year her contract grew and with the help of her primary sponsor, KHS bicycles, Coats was able to live and ride, without spending as much time trying to make ends meet. Although she continued competing in biathlon, it wasn’t long before bike racing became her primary focus.
“I didn’t go to Europe to compete [in biathlon] in the winter of ’95—I just stayed and trained because I was making money and surviving as a racer, rather than being an Olympian,” she recalls.
After becoming an Olympian and competing in seven world championships as a biathlete, Coats made a clean cut away from skiing. Her decision paid off.
By the end of 1995, Coats was ranked 10th among professional women mountain bikers. At the Olympic mountain bike qualifiers in 1996 she came in sixth, two places away from a guaranteed spot on the women’s Olympic team. In 1997 she came in fourth at the mountain biking World Cup in Vermont and was ranked third in the nation.
After just a few years in the sport, Coats was causing a buzz in the mountain biking media, which was reveling in her underdog wins. In early 1998, after she mowed down a field of riders in Monterey, California, Mountain Bike Magazine predicted she would be the next world champion.
Her next race was set to be in Napa Valley the weekend after Monterey, but instead of staying in California like most of her competitors, Coats wanted to return to Colorado to complete a 100-mile road bike ride from Boulder through Estes Park.
With her gaze falling to the floor, she says of leaving California that week, “It was the dumbest thing I ever could have done.”
She wouldn’t have thought so had it just been for the 100-mile ride, or even the training rides she took the following day. But after the training rides were over, Coats met a friend in Eldorado Canyon State Park for a day of climbing that would change her life forever.
It was a beautiful spring day in the canyon a few miles outside of Boulder. The weather in the late winter months of 1998 had been erratic, with days of warmth and sunshine followed by snow and freezing temperatures. The freeze-thaw cycle had compromised parts of the rock face.
The route they were on was easy. “You could walk it but you needed to hold on a little bit,” she says, admitting that her physical abilities surpassed her ability to judge the integrity of the rock she was climbing.
Although the route they were on was easy, it was very exposed, falling precipitously for 40 feet. As Coats led her partner, well-known writer and mountaineer Pete Takeda, up the face with a mass of gear slung over her shoulder, her hand-hold gave way.
“The rocks pulled right out of the wall, which made me lose my balance,” she says before pausing to push aside the pain of remembering. “Then my feet slipped out from underneath me and I grabbed on with one arm to a rock and held on for a long time with one arm, but with all of the weight I had on my back…”
Coats fell backward through the air before landing in a talus field below the Bastille Crack, a 5.8 rated climbing feature, where she rolled to the bottom of the slope and came to rest unconscious, on her back with her feet over her head.
Her fall had resulted in three broken vertebrae, a left arm that was crushed from her fingertips up and a fractured right shoulder. She had a giant hole in her hip and the force of landing had crushed her heart between the sternum and spine. As Takeda approached her body, Coats stopped breathing.
Coats has no memory of the event; friends have filled in the details of that morning for her. But she struggles with the effects of those events to this day.
“If they knew then what they know now, they would have started an ice-cold saline solution in my spinal column,” she says, (but the doctors at Boulder County Hospital didn’t know).
Immediately after the fall, doctors found themselves unable to operate due to the weakened state of her heart. Over the next three days swelling continued to build, compressing her spinal cord and doing potentially irreparable damage that left Coats paralyzed from the abdomen down.
“It was a choice they gave my family,” says Coats. “‘We can operate right now and get the swelling off of her spinal cord and we’d save the spinal cord, but she probably won’t live.’” For her family, it wasn’t really a choice at all.