Lutz Gössing

Ludwig Gössing, known throughout German equestrian sport as Lutz Gössing (also spelled Lutz Goessing), was born on 13 May 1938 in Dortmund. He grew up on his family's farm in Schleswig-Holstein and entered competitive riding the way many West German riders of his generation did: through rural club sport, then the hard school of eventing, the three-discipline mix of dressage, cross-country, and show jumping that German riders still call the Busch.

By his mid-twenties he was already in the national system. In 1963 he arrived at the Deutsche Olympiade-Komitee für Reiterei (DOKR) in Warendorf. In 1964 he was close to Olympic selection for the still all-German team, but sport-political choices kept him off that squad. He then won the German eventing championship in 1966 and again in 1967, riding for Reiterverein Warendorf. Those titles made him a fixture of the Federal Republic's Olympic pathway.

At the 1968 Mexico City Games he competed in team and individual eventing on Arved. Tropical rain on the cross-country course ended his individual run, and the West German team finished fifth. Four years later, after a win at Luhmühlen, he was selected for Munich 1972 with the ten-year-old grey gelding Chicago (also written Chikago). Dressage went poorly. Chicago, Equi Pages later wrote, seemed to have forgotten every basic of the dressage test. What followed was a bold cross-country ride on a course that, with roads and tracks and the steeplechase phase, stretched more than eighteen kilometres. That effort pulled West Germany back toward the medals. On 11 September 1972 the team of Gössing, Harry Klugmann, Karl Schultz, and Horst Karsten took bronze behind Great Britain and the United States. Individually Gössing finished thirteenth. The Federal Republic awarded him the Silver Laurel Leaf, Germany's highest sports honour, that same month.

After Munich he lacked a suitable eventing horse and turned fully to show jumping and breeding. With his wife Christa he ran a tournament yard in Brockhagen, in the Steinhagen municipality of Westphalia, affiliated with Reiterverein Brockhagen-Völckebeck (also written Brockhagen-Kölckebeck). He rode thirteen Nations Cup competitions for Germany. As a breeder he produced a still-unusual double: in 1985 and 1986 he won the German Bundeschampionat twice with the mare Rosella G (by Ramiro), a horse he both bred and rode himself.

The Brockhagen yard became a school for younger riders. Mylène Diederichsmeier trained there and for years presented the Gössing horses in sport. Heinrich-Hermann Johannsmann and Susanne Behring also passed through. Late in the 1980s Gössing accompanied junior and young-rider teams to European championships as a chef d'équipe. For those services he received the Peace Rider Prize of the Westphalian riding association and, in 2008, the Deutsche Reiterkreuz in silver from the Deutsche Reiterliche Vereinigung (FN). Olympedia notes that he later became president of a golf club in Ostenfelde.

In 2010, for economic and personal reasons, the couple prepared to close the tournament stable. Diederichsmeier left that summer. From autumn 2010 Tim Rieskamp-Goedeking took over the family's horses and, in April 2010 arrangements, the facility. Christa Gössing died of cancer on 28 December 2011 after forty-five years of marriage. Lutz remained a familiar face at shows whenever Rieskamp-Goedeking competed, even after his own disc surgery.

Friendships from the Olympic years mattered to him. In December 2018, after celebrating his eightieth birthday quietly on Sylt in May, he gathered the Munich 1972 team at the Ententurm in Steinhagen-Brockhagen: Schultz, Karsten, Klugmann, and the reserve riders Helmut Rethemeier, Otto Ammermann, and Diedrich Fick. Westfalen-Blatt reported it as their first full reunion in about twenty years.

Lutz Gössing died on 27 September 2026 at the age of eighty-eight. Equi Pages and German Wikipedia recorded the same date. English Wikipedia's deaths list for 2026 names him under Ludwig Gössing as Olympic bronze medallist of 1972. He left behind a life that joined farm roots, Olympic bronze, Bundeschampionat breeding, and decades of patronage in Westphalian sport.