Steve Larsen on McKenzie Pass Highway during the Cascade Cycling Classic in July 2003.

Michael Larsen’s favorite memory of his brother is from 2000, when Steve Larsen was denied a spot on the U.S. Olympic Mountain Bike Team that would compete in the Sydney Games.

In the next national race, a vengeful Larsen crushed his countrymen — including the two riders who made the Olympic team — by a stunning margin.

He did not lose a race for four months afterward.

“I think I proved who was the athlete who was most deserving of a trip to Sydney,” Larsen told The Bulletin a few years later.

That competitive fire, which drove the California native and longtime Bend resident to stardom as a cyclist and triathlete — and probably earned him a few detractors — was tragically extinguished Tuesday.

Larsen collapsed after just starting a training session with a group of about 40 runners that meets regularly on Tuesday evenings to run at Cascade Middle School in Bend. He died of what the medical examiner called sudden cardiac arrest.

He was just 39, and he left behind a wife and five children.

Larsen was one of the most decorated endurance athletes to ever live in Central Oregon, an area teeming with accomplished sports figures. The road bike racer turned mountain biker turned triathlete is believed to be the only athlete ever to compete in world championships in six different disciplines: road cycling, mountain biking, track cycling, cyclocross, road triathlon and off-road triathlon.

“Steve was undoubtedly the most driven person I’ve ever met,” Michael Larsen, of Bend, said Wednesday. “As an older brother, it’s ironic; I was always looking up to him. When he was 9, he had three paper routes and was buying bikes because he knew what he wanted to do.”

Raised in Davis, Calif., Steve Larsen competed in his first bike race when he was 14 and was mentored by three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond.

Larsen started his professional cycling career as a road cyclist, racing on the Motorola team in the early 1990s alongside teammate Lance Armstrong, who would later go on to win the Tour de France seven times.

Upon learning of Larsen’s death, Armstrong posted this message on twitter.com Wednesday: “So sad hearing about the loss of Steve Larsen. Leaves a wife and 5 kids. Terrible. He and I were on natl team and Motorola together.”

Larsen first lived in Bend from 1995 to 2000, then returned to stay in 2003.

In 1994, Larsen shifted his focus to mountain biking, winning the national cross-country mountain bike championship in 1997 and again in 2000, the year he was left off the Olympic team.

“I’m clearly the top American and when we go head to head like this, there’s no question that I’m the best guy,” Larsen was quoted on mtbike.mountainzone.com when he won the 2000 national shortly after learning he would not be going to the Olympics. “I had a real point to prove and I wasn’t going to give up any seconds.”

“He was a straight shooter — and that turned some people off,” Michael Larsen said of his brother. “But his friends knew who they were. He was very, very loyal.

“He made an impression and people loved or hated him. And even the people that hate him respect him.”

No matter what run-ins Larsen had with fellow athletes, by all accounts he was an intensely devoted husband to his wife, Carrie, and father to their five children: Amalia, 13; Massimo, 11; Gunnar, 4; and twins Marco and Matteo, 2.

“He’s the most gifted athlete I’ve ever been around, but I’ve never seen someone like that so focused on his family,” said Matt Lieto, a fellow Bend triathlete and a friend of Larsen’s. “Some of his competitive nature went into taking care of his kids. It’s saddening, to say the least.”

Larsen also leaves behind his mother, Connie Larsen, of Bend; his father, Tom Larsen, of Davis; his stepfather, Jim Hannesson, of Bend; and two older brothers: Michael, and Tom Larsen Jr., of Salt Lake City.

In 2000, Steve Larsen competed in Central Oregon’s Cascade Cycling Classic and single-handedly took on the Mercury team, which had been dominating the domestic circuit for years. Mercury had to use all of its team tactics to relegate Larsen to second place — and then by only a few seconds.

Larsen turned to triathlon in 2001, often scoring top-10 finishes in national and international competition.

He officially retired from professional racing at the end of 2003, but he continued to compete at a high level in retirement. He ran the Ironman World Championships triathlon in Hawaii last October, and he finished sixth in the XTERRA West Cup Triathlon at Lake Las Vegas earlier this month.

The shocking news of Larsen’s death sent chills through Central Oregon’s tightknit endurance-athlete community.

Lieto said he received about 40 phone calls asking about Larsen on Tuesday night. Word had spread that Larsen had suffered a heart attack.

“I was almost nonchalant about it,” Lieto said. “It’s Steve Larsen, and I don’t know a fitter human being. I always thought of him as invincible. He throttled me three weeks ago in a training ride.”

Since his retirement in 2003, Larsen worked in real estate, first with Lowes Commercial Properties in Bend and later with his own company, Steve Larsen Properties.

Peter Lowes, owner of The Lowes Group, gave Larsen his first job in real estate in early 2004. The two were introduced by a mutual friend, and although Larsen had no experience in real estate, Lowes said he knew almost immediately that Larsen could be successful in the industry.

“He was an incredibly driven and talented broker, just a talented individual,” Lowes said. “He will be sorely missed.”

Rod Bien, owner of Fleet Feet running store in Bend, was friends with Larsen through the running community, and because Larsen was his real estate agent.

“The guy just emanated a sense of health and fitness,” Bien said. “He was so well-rounded. There was nothing that he couldn’t do. I can’t wrap my head around it, to be honest.

“Just with having such a large, young family … it’s totally devastating.”

Memorial service

A memorial service for Steve Larsen will be held Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Les Schwab Amphitheater, behind the stage, in Bend.

A man of many accomplishments

1997: National cross-country mountain bike champion

2000: National cross-country mountain bike champion

2001: Fourth place Wildflower Triathlon

2001: First place Half-Vineman Triathlon

2001: First place Ironman Lake Placid

2002: Sixth place Quelle Challenge (Ironman)

2003: Sixth place Ironman New Zealand

2003: Second place Half-Vineman Triathlon

2003: Second place XTERRA Triathlon USA Championships

2003: Second place Wildflower Triathlon