Matthias Gotter

He watched the goings-on at the shop and the bikes on display with great enthusiasm. Teichreber had a chrome-plated Diamond-Back complete bike in the window – a dream come true. Matthias fell in love with it and pressed his nose flat against the window, but his parents wouldn’t hear of him taking up yet another sport – and certainly not one so expensive. Gotter was already in the swimming club at the time, played tennis, had done karate and was the state champion in the 800m – so his schedule was more than full and the family budget was feeling the strain.

But he’d taken a real shine to BMX, so he found a holiday job and saved up for the bike, which he rode out of the shop in 1981, proud as punch. At the BMX track, he got to know the first generation of Grohns BMXers: Kai Jesse, Jan Fattauer, Michael Leuner, Fred Rennemüller and the Klostermann brothers. He competed in his first races and swapped the very short Diamond-Back for a slightly roomier second-hand Redline from Andreas Teichreber, who, given his proximity to the source, was naturally the go-to person for bargain deals back then.

By the time he won the first unofficial German BMX championship on the Centurion Supercup in October 1981, it was clear that Matthias had both talent and determination, and even his parents were slowly beginning to realise that he was serious about it. They threw themselves headlong into the affairs of the newly formed Vegesacker BMX Club and helped build up the BMX scene in North Bremen. His mother Margot became treasurer and his father Detlef the club’s notorious coach. As well as gate starts and track training, he regularly sent the lads up the hills in nearby Knoops Park, only for them to carry each other back down piggyback. The ‘drill sergeant’, as they called him – sometimes affectionately, sometimes less so – was determined to get the very best out of his charges.

Matthias, in particular, always stood out for his fitness, which was unusually good for a BMX rider. The worse the ground conditions – the softer or muddier the ground – the better he performed. Following his success in the mud in October 1981, he went on to win in the sandpit at Hamburg-Harburg and in the mud battle at Leverkusen in 1984. Matthias’s stamina and determination were impressive. So impressive, in fact, that Ekkehardt Teichreber tried to persuade him to take up cyclo-cross, where he could supposedly make better use of his strengths in one-hour races. Matthias vividly recalls the puddle into which the contents of his stomach spilled after one of his first training sessions with the former world runner-up. That was probably a bit too much endurance for him, so he remained loyal to BMX.

But that, of course, cost a fair bit of money too. The Gotters realised early on that there was such a thing as sponsorship in the sport and got in touch with the dealers and manufacturers who ran teams in Germany. There weren’t many of them. There were the factory teams from Schauff and Kalkhoff (though the latter was, understandably, hardly an option) and the teams from the major importers Instant Funk / Sport Import and Hajo’s. Hartwig Hofherr showed an interest in the fast lad from the north and summoned Matthias to a trial training session in Herborn, where he was to prove his skills against Hajo’s already established stars of the time, such as Ivi Vidakovic. And apparently he passed the test: in May 1983, Hofherr kitted him out at the Hockenheimring with a brand-new black chrome-plated GT bike and the matching kit. When GT changed wholesalers the following year, Matthias was provided with a lavishly equipped CW Phase One, on which he rode during his best and most successful years. Hajo’s remained his first and only sponsor, and for the final season of his career he moved to the renowned Hajo’s Redline Team after CW was no longer generating the desired sales.

But gradually other things crept into his life, vying for his attention. His girlfriend and his vocational training took up more and more of his time, and BMX gradually faded into the background. For a short while, Matthias followed in his father’s footsteps, acting as a coach at the track, before finally hanging up his bike.

Today, Matthias works as a teacher at a vocational college and competes in road cycling and mountain bike marathons. What he remembers most from his BMX days are the many trips he went on, but also his parents’ tremendous dedication. Together, they created the conditions for a new sport, and as a child, much of it seemed to go without saying, though looking back, it was an enormous and selfless effort.

Matthias Gotter is one of Germany’s pioneering BMX riders; he was the first German champion in our fledgling sport and has therefore secured his place in the Hall of Fame. Yet the rest of his career is equally impressive. Whilst others tended to be fair-weather riders or were already dabbling in the glamour of freestyle, Matthias was a pure racer whose strengths became all the more apparent the worse the conditions were. In this way, he embodies the spirit of the early years, when BMX was still proper ‘cross’. A warm welcome, Matthias!