Edmund Overend (born August 20, 1955) is an American former professional cross-country mountain bike racer. He is a six-time NORBA cross-country mountain bike national champion who became the first-ever cross-country world champion by winning the inaugural UCI Mountain Bike World Championship in 1990. Overend was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1990 and into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in 2001. Overend moved to Durango, Colorado in the early 1980s where he first became involved in cycling by entering Durango’s Iron Horse Classic, a 47-mile road race with 6,700 feet of climbing along a narrow gauge railroad. He needed to finish the qualifier race in fourth place to qualify for the Olympic team alongside Tinker Juarez but, one and a half miles from the finish line, he suffered a flat tire and finished in eighth place. During his professional mountain biking career, Overend earned the nicknames "Deadly Nedly" and "The Lung", because he was very difficult to beat and for his exceptional aerobic endurance at altitude (especially so for a man of his age), respectively. Overend also appears in competition sequences of "The Sun Valley Mountain Bike Challenge," a video chronicle of that year's NORBA Championships also released in 1988. thumb|Ned Overend Appears in "The Great Mountain Biking Video," Big Bear Lakes, California, 1987 He also appeared in a mountain-bike race video entitled "Battle At Durango: The First-Ever World Mountain Biking Championships" videotaped in Durango, Colorado in 1990, and released by New & Unique Videos in 1991.
Major achievements
Incomplete list
- UCI World Mountain Biking Champion (Gold, 1990; Bronze 1991)