July 3, 2026 
Last week, in the five-star Grand Prix at the Longines League of Nations in Rotterdam, a spectacular podium placing from a New Zealand rider had everyone asking “Who is Luke Dee?!”
It was no lightweight jump off, sporting no less than three of the world’s top ten—Ben Maher, Richard Vogel, and Nina Mallevaey. We also had riders such as Rodrigo Pessoa, Willem Greve, and Martin Fuchs making an appearance in a tense, 11-rider matchup.
Last to go in the jump off was Luke Dee on his 10-year-old horse Gangster WW, bred by Wilhelm Winkeler of Germany, a gelding by Grand Slam VDL out of a Kannan mare.
Did Luke Dee have any hesitations entering a jump off where so many sported such impressive credentials? If he was, he hardly showed it, blazing a track that beat everyone except the winner Ben Maher and the stallion Point Break, who managed to squeak out the win with a time only 0.16 seconds faster than Dee.
But who is Luke Dee?
No one I asked had the answer, so I begged my editor to set up an interview with the elusive 32-year-old New Zealander. I well-remembered Julie Davey competing at the FEI World Cup in Fort Worth and how internet mobs of patriotic Kiwis flooded the comment section with words of praise and support for their countrywoman. It was no different when the name “Luke Dee” showed up on the result list from Rotterdam.
I can’t let the internet mobs down!
The first thing you need to know is that Luke Dee is a man with a plan. That rhymes, but what he really is, is a man and a team with a plan, and part of that team is Gangster WW’s co-owner Fiona Hall.
It was after a stint gaining experience in Europe riding for the likes of Cian O’Connor and Darragh Kenny that Dee returned home to New Zealand and met Hall. It was Hall who initially floated the idea of making a play for the 2026 World Championships in Aachen.
That was five years ago. And now, says Dee, “something that started out as a dream on a piece of paper has turned out to be something pretty incredible.”
A little over a month out from the World Championships and Dee is in contention, just as they planned.
Fortune favors the bold, they say, and perhaps that is what Dee brought to Europe five years ago. Gangster was the first horse he tried (and he tried only two) and he fell in love with him “straightaway.”
“He was very difficult. He was not easy. He was very hot, very strong, but had a lot of raw talent which I loved from the moment I sat on him,” he shared.
At the time, Gangster was only six-years old and had a lot of maturing to do. But Dee is of equestrian stock. He grew up around horses with his father, a racehorse trainer. He started riding early and began competing at age seven. Both of his siblings, a sister and a brother, rode as well. The latter is now a racehorse jockey in Melbourne, Australia.
Expectations were high when Dee was young: “We learned to do everything ourselves. There were no grooms or anything like that. If we’d ever come home from school and not want to ride our ponies then, well, we were told they were going to be sold the next day. We weren’t expected to ride, but if we were going to ride, we were expected to make the commitment to the horses.
“It was a fantastic way to grow up in New Zealand. We’d go to shows every weekend and go pack up the horse truck with our ponies and me, my parents, my brother and sister would all be camping in the truck together. That was kind of just what we did, and that was what our summers looked like. Taking care of a live animal really taught us a lot as children growing up.”
Growing Gangster up has been its own learning curve.
Dee took over the reins in 2022 and spent the first year developing the young horse at national shows in New Zealand. They made their FEI debut in 2023 with a single one-star class in Taupo, New Zealand and, nine months later in the fall of 2024, were jumping 1.60m in Australia. To considerable success. They immediately went on to record three top four finishes in one-star World Cup qualifiers, finishing second in the New Zealand League Final in January before heading to Europe for the five-star Longines FEI Jumping World Cup Final in Basel.
“I jumped my first World Cup on him when he was technically eight and he handled that well. He didn’t bat an eyelid. He was extremely brave,” shared Dee. “As he got older, he naturally matured, obviously, and the more we did with him and the bigger things got, he rose to the occasion. His eight-year-old year was when we first started to see bits and pieces of the Gangster we see today.”
For the 18 months, they’ve been based in Europe where they’ve been training with championship stalwarts Laura Kraut and Nick Skelton as well as Dutch equestrian Emile Hendrix, who, he says, “understood Gangster from the start.”
“[Emile] was able to help with his hotness. It’s very much working with Gangster and his quirks rather than trying to change them or anything like that. We just take our time with things.”
Most of the time, he continued, that means allowing the ever-hot Gangster to calm down in the pressurized atmosphere of a show. Dee begins his warmup early and allows time for Gangster to relax between warmup jumps.
“Then obviously Nick and Laura run a pretty slick operation, so I’ve got pretty good trio of mentors that I’m very lucky to have.”
And what’s it like to be a New Zealander in Europe, the hopes of a nation hanging on your latest round?
“The support back home is huge. The support is absolutely incredible and it feels like a lot of the time I’ve got all of the New Zealand equestrian community riding Gangster with me!”
