WHEN it comes to Olympic memorabilia, it doesn’t get much bigger than one of the four gold medals awarded to Jesse Owens for his remarkable performances at the 1936 Munich Games.
The Jesse Owens Munich 1936 gold medal which sold for an Olympic record price at auction.
In winning the 100m, 200m, 4 x 100m and long jump he infuriated the watching Nazis who wanted the Games to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.
The sale of his medal was always going to create massive worldwide interest and so it proved at SCP Auctions of California. At the end of an online auction on the morning of Sunday, December 8, it had been bought by Ron Burkle, US billionaire investor and co-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey club, for a whopping $1,222,145 (£745,210), plus 20% buyer’s premium.
Owens set three Olympic records in 1936 and 77 years later this medal sale proved to be a record-breaker, racing past the previous top sum for Olympic memorabilia sold at auction, set in April last year when the winner’s cup from the first Olympic marathon at the Athens 1896 Games was sold at Sotheby’s for a premium-inclusive £541,250.
Burkle also now owns a medal awarded to another great American: William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for literature, which was offered at Sotheby’s New York in June in an online auction but was not sold in that sale. He is set to take both on an educational tour.
It is not known precisely which of the four events Owens’ gold was awarded for but the whereabouts of the three other original 1936 golds are not known, giving this even more rarity value and desirability. The Owens family confirmed it was an original. Owens had given the gold medal to his friend, the entertainer Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, as thanks for trying to help him find work, and it came down to the vendor by family descent.
But Owens was not exactly heartily welcomed back to a USA where racial segregation was widespread and it took decades for his achievements to be officially recognised.
He said: “When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either.”
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