Kathy Lynch

Kathleen "Kathy" Lynch (born 23 April 1957) is a retired competitive cyclist from New Zealand who had a distinguished career both on and off the road. A talented multi-sportswoman, she won the canoeing events New Zealand White Water Downriver and Slalom Championships in 1987 and represented her country at the 1988 Canoe Slalom World Cup. Around the same time, she was also a successful triathlete, but did not continue with that sport. She bought her first mountain bike in 1988, when she was aged 31, so that she could compete in an adventure sport event, and within a year she had become the New Zealand national cross country champion. Around the same time, she also took up road cycling. She was included in the New Zealand team for the 1990 Commonwealth Games and was a domestique for the top New Zealand road rider, Madonna Harris, but sprinted so strongly towards the finish line that she dropped Harris from the wheel. Harris came fourth and Lynch, who blew up with 100 metres (330 ft) to go, came eighth. In September 1990, Lynch competed at the inaugural UCI Mountain Bike World Championships. Briefly hospitalised with internal bleeding not long before the race, she did not fulfill her potential and was disappointed with coming tenth. In November 1990, she became a household name in New Zealand by winning a 22-day multi-sport race the length of the country that had prime time TV coverage every night.

Lynch went to several world championships competing on the road, in the road race and in time trial, and off the road in cross country. Lynch missed out on making the New Zealand road cycling team for the 1992 Olympics. She tried to prove the point that her omission was a mistake by trying to do well at that year's Tour de France Féminin and demonstrated that by coming sixth. In 1992, she entered the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the veteran category and won bronze in both the cross country and the downhill events. When it was announced in 1994 that mountain biking was to become an Olympic discipline, Lynch's focus went on being picked for the New Zealand team. For that reason, she swapped from the veteran class to elite at the world championships. She became New Zealand's first representative in an Olympic mountain biking event at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. Aged 39, she was the oldest competitor in the event, but she managed a respectable eighth place, leaving two previous world champions behind her. She retired from serious competition after the Olympics, with the exception of the first UCI World Cup in April 1997 that was held in her home country. Until her mid-40s, she competed at the top level in adventure racing. During her domestic career, Lynch won many national titles, and was a serial winner at premium events such as the Karapoti Classic and the Coast to Coast.