lit a candle 3h agookay this is a weird one for me to even be posting about. i was looking up Mexico City 1968 for a completely unrelated reason, trying to find out what year some cookbook was published and got sidetracked into an Olympics rabbit hole like you do, and his name kept coming up, 63.08 meters, silver behind Oerter. i don't know anything about discus, never watched it, couldn't tell you a single other thrower's name from that whole decade. but there's something about reading a stat like that at 11pm at my kitchen table with cold coffee that makes a stranger feel real for a second. anyway. 91 years old, Halle, Germany, engineer after he stopped competing apparently. sorry if this is a dumb comment to leave, I just didn't want to close the tab without saying something. rest well I guess
Their story
Lothar Milde was an East German discus thrower from Halle who won the Olympic silver medal at the 1968 Games in Mexico City, finishing behind the great American Al Oerter. A towering figure in the throwing circle at 1.95 metres tall, he competed at three Olympic Games, won four medals…
Lothar Milde was an East German discus thrower from Halle who won the Olympic silver medal at the 1968 Games in Mexico City, finishing behind the great American Al Oerter. A towering figure in the throwing circle at 1.95 metres tall, he competed at three Olympic Games, won four medals at the European Championships, took six East German titles and captained the East German athletics team for six years. After his sporting career he built a second life as an engineer and trade unionist, rising after German reunification to lead the IG Metall union in Saxony-Anhalt.
He was born on 8 November 1934 in Halle (Saale), the city where he would live, train and eventually die. He trained as an engineer for machine tool construction and threw the discus for SC Chemie Halle, the city's elite sports club founded in 1958 and today continued as SV Halle. His coach was Lothar Hinz. By June 1959, photographs from the Federal Archives show him placing second in the discus at an evening meeting in Berlin's Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark.
In the years when athletes from both German states had to compete together, he twice went to the Olympics with the United Team of Germany. At Rome in 1960 he finished 12th in the discus, and at Tokyo in 1964 he was eliminated in the qualifying round, placing 14th. In between he became a European medallist, taking bronze at the 1962 European Championships in Belgrade with 55.47 metres while competing for Germany. A Federal Archives caption from March 1963 described him as the German record holder in the event.
He won the East German championship in 1961, 1962 and 1963, and after East Germany began fielding its own teams he became one of its leading athletes. From 1966 to 1971 he was captain of the East German national athletics team. At the 1966 European Championships in Budapest he took bronze with 56.80 metres in an East German one-two-three, behind his teammates Detlef Thorith and Hartmut Losch.
His greatest day came in October 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. Aged 33, he threw 63.08 metres to take the silver medal, finishing behind Al Oerter, who won his fourth consecutive Olympic title with an Olympic record of 64.78 metres, and ahead of Czechoslovakia's Ludvík Daněk. It was the first Olympic medal in the men's discus for any German athlete. He was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze that year.
He stayed at the top of the event for several more seasons. In August 1969, at the East German championships in Berlin, he improved his own national record by 28 centimetres to 63.60 metres, and that year he reached his personal best of 64.16 metres. He took a third European bronze at Athens in 1969 with 59.34 metres, and in 1971 in Helsinki he won the European silver medal with 61.62 metres. He added national titles in 1968, 1969 and 1971. In 1970 the painter Rolf Kiy portrayed him in the oil painting Diskuswerfer Lothar Milde.
Alongside sport he took part in public life in East Germany. From 1963 into the 1980s he sat as a deputy in the Bezirkstag, the regional assembly of the district of Halle. He worked as a machine tool engineer, served on the presidium of the East German athletics federation, the DVfL, and remained on its board until 1984, and became a trade union official. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification he became the regional chairman of IG Metall in Saxony-Anhalt. According to Olympedia, financial irregularities were later discovered at a university sports club he led, after which he lost all his public offices and was sentenced to a prison term.
He remained connected to the club where he had made his name. At the 50th anniversary celebration of SC Chemie and SV Halle in 2008 he spoke about the thousands of children in Halle living below the poverty line and urged the club to offer them sport free of charge.
Lothar Milde died on 5 October 2026 in a care home in Halle after a long and serious illness, at the age of 91. His death was confirmed by SV Halle to the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, which reported it on 21 October 2026. The club's president, Hardy Gnewuch, said he had been one of the defining discus throwers of the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography adapted from Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (21 October 2026); Olympedia; German Federal Archives photo captions via Wikimedia Commons; SV Halle club history; English and German Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Platforms searche.
In their own words
“He was one of the defining discus throwers of the sixties and seventies.”
Hardy Gnewuch, president of SV Halle, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 21 October 2026 (translated from German: Er gehörte zu den prägenden Diskuswerfern der sechziger und siebziger Jahre)
not dumb at all, nice that you looked him up properly