Swedish Olympic dressage rider Major Anders Lindgren passed away at the age of 85. The former cavalry officer has been ill for quite some time. Lindgren was an accomplished rider having won the 1971 Swedish Dressage Championship.
He was the reserve rider on the Swedish Olympic Team in 1972 and also won the Scandinavian Eventing Championship in 1959.
Lindgren was also the first inductee into the USDF Hall of Fame in recognition of his seminal training of U.S. Dressage Instructors. Over a ten-year period, almost 1000 participating instructors learned from his systematic, structured approach to teaching dressage at the USDF Violet Hopkins National Seminars. He was an early proponent of the USDF Instructor Certification Program, and his work laid the foundation for this program. Major Lindgren first entered the world of U.S. dressage in 1981 when Colonel Aage Sommer brought him to Violet Hopkins' farm in Michigan for the first USDF National Instructors Seminar.
Hundreds of professional and amateur dressage instructors and students have benefited from Lindren's teaching. His students have competed successfully nationally and internationally at the FEI levels, and include Lilo Fore, Alexsandra Howard, and Kyra Kyrklund.
Lindgren served as Finnish team trainer in the 1970s. Finnish legendary Olympian Kyra Kyrklund cliniced with him regulary when she was training her horse Piccolo with Walter Christensen in Germany .
"Anders had quite good excersises, very much with precission in mind," Kyra told Eurodressage. He used a lot of cones to get the riders to focus more on were they wanted to go. At the clinics he also gave good talkes on riding in theory."
Lindgren lived in the United States since 1981 and had moved back to Sweden in the early 1990s.
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