held in New Zealand. 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. Early life Kathy Lynch was born in 1957 in Hāwera, Taranaki and grew up in that town. She represented New Zealand in netball early in her life. As a young woman, Lynch broke her leg while skiing at Whakapapa skifield. Pete Braggins was the ski patroller who assisted her and has been her partner since. They moved to Motueka in the 1980s. Lynch took up canoeing and in 1987 won the New Zealand White Water Downriver and Slalom Championships. Road and mountain bike racing In 1988, at the age of 31, she bought her first mountain bike two weeks out from the Fresh Up Alpine Ironman in Queenstown. Her biographer, Simon Kennett, considered that she had purchased a bike with rather poor brakes (Lynch termed it a "piece of shit") and after weeks of crashing, Lynch thought mountain biking was a "dumb sport". Fellow Motueka resident Karen Holliday encouraged Lynch to take up road cycling instead. Lynch was laughed at when she turned up to her first race wearing coloured socks, when the convention was to race in white socks. In response Holliday and Lynch started wearing matching coloured socks for races. In 1988, Lynch competed at the inaugural Canoe Slalom World Cup in Augsburg, Germany, and placed 19th in the K-1 sprint event. Lynch also tried triathlons and came fourth (out of 160 finishers) in the 1989 Nelson Women's Triathlon, but did not continue with that event. Despite her initial dislike of the sport, she entered her first mountain bike race in February 1989 in an intermediate-level category and had lap times comparable to the winner of the women's expert category. She entered the next race in the expert category—the second round of the National Championship Series held on Christchurch's Port Hills—and came second. Lynch then borrowed a quality mountain bike and won the third race of the national series that was held in Queenstown with an impressive 11-minute margin. This saw her secure a sponsorship deal with Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes, then regarded as one of the best brands of mountain bike available. Her next race was the longer-distance Karapoti Classic, the fourth time that