A 110-metre hurdles gold medal won in the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis is being sold this month. It has already attracted bids of just under $170,000.
The gold award is a 39mm disc both designed and made by Dieges & Clust of New York for the Olympiad.
The games, the first held outside Europe after the Athens and Paris games that started the modern Olympic movement, were a very American affair.
International travel in 1904 was a matter of long steam-ship journeys. It took around five days to get from London to New York. The Russo-Japanese war didn’t make travel any safer.
To that could be added a long, difficult journey well into the American interior to St Louis, nearly 1,000 miles from New York.
The result was a massively unbalanced group of competitors with around 90% coming from North America and only 15 nations sending athletes.
The athletics field at St Louis, which poached the games from Chicago, the original winners of the bidding process.
The medals won there, in the first games to award gold, silver and bronze for the first three places, are now extremely desirable.
The vast majority went to US athletes, who topped the medals table with 76 of a potential 97 golds.
This is one of them.
The medal, in gold, carries the “Olympiad, 1904” legend with an ancient Greece-inspired design showing an athlete in front of the Acropolis.
On the rear of the medal is a Standing Nike and a bust of Zeus along with the “110 meter hurdle” designation.
The medal is in excellent condition. It comes with its original ribbon and presentation case.
The 110-metre hurdles was won by American Fred Schule, a multisport athlete and educator.
The medal is for sale in an online auction that ends on January 17. Fourteen bids have already pushed the price up to just over $168,000.
The most valuable ever Olympic medals are treasured because of their stories.
Jesse Owens’ four medals won in Berlin in 1936 are the most valuable. One sold for $1.4 million in 2018.
In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wladimir Klitschko sold his gold medal from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for $1 million to raise funds for his homeland. The buyer immediately gave the medal back to its winner.
Otherwise, older medals are valuable. A silver medal from the 1896 Athens games made £180,000 in 2014.
With weeks to go before the sale closes, this 1904 medal may go past that amount and beyond.
