I suspect the answer lies in your own narrative:
turned left steeply
A steep turn at 200 feet in that kind of wind doesn’t sound wise to me. Not because of the wind strength, and not because he was turning downwind, but because a 50kt wind at 200 feet is NEVER a steady air mass, and is thus irrelevant to this discussion.
Or maybe the pilot was a subscriber to the “downwind turn myth” and lowered the nose because he was scared of losing airspeed
