and athletes who had completed their event partying all night. Lynch moved out and shared accommodation with Jacqui Nelson in a suburb. Whilst this required a two-hour bus ride to the mountain bike venue, it made for a more pleasant stay and sufficient sleep. The mountain bike course overlapped with the equestrian venue and was not open for mountain bike training until two days prior to the race. Lynch ignored this and promptly ran into an American army unit looking for bombs and was arrested. After an hour's detention, one of the mountain bike officials verified that she was a competitor. The race day, 30 July, was the hottest of the Olympic Games, and the laps were reduced to . Lynch settled into fifth place in the first lap, but crashed on one of the corners. A few riders went past and she continued in 12th place. In the third lap, the heat became unbearable, but Lynch had a CamelBak with frozen drink; one of the few riders to do so. She kept her pace as other riders struggled. She finished 8th, with two previous world champions behind her (Juli Furtado in 10th, and Silvia Fürst in 16th). Post-Olympic racing Lynch saw the Olympics as a perfect time to retire from the serious competitions. She did not go to the 1996 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Cairns, Australia, but competed in the Southern Traverse Adventure Race instead. One event that she could not miss, though, was the Wellington mountain bike race that was part of the UCI World Cup in April 1997; it was the first UCI mountain bike World Cup race that had come to New Zealand. Her dominance early in the season waned, though, and she was beaten into second place at both the Coast to Coast (won by Andrea Murray) and the first race of the national series. At the Karapoti Classic, she only just fended off Jill Westenra. For the UCI World Cup race, Lynch was in top form and came sixth, well within her aim of a top 10 finish, and just days away from her 40th birthday. After that, she won the remaining rounds of the national championship races in which she started. In 1998, Lynch came second to Susy Pryde in the first three races of the national series, and then pulled out of the competition. When she was crowned Nelson Sportsperson