Let’s play secrets.
One day, in Beijing, I was given a medal: an Olympic participant’s medal. All athletes receive them; also the journalists who cover the Games. I saw, I didn’t win, I returned: at least I was there. I left the medal on the shelf. The story didn’t end there. It occurred to me to collect some more. Sports fetishism, personal intrahistory. You had to search a lot and save a little, but it was possible. Thus began a road to perdition. Bidding at auctions in the early hours of the morning, searching in numismatic shops around the world, hunting for the unwary on Wallapop.
Let’s continue with the secrets.
The medals began to arrive at my house: new, shiny, in their original box. Tokyo 64, futuristic; Moscow 80, communist: those were the first. The one from Rio 16 came from Latvia. The one from London 48, with Big Ben on the obverse, was intact in its little green John Pinches Medalists box. The longed-for medal from Berlin 36, with the shadow of Hitler embedded in its Nazi eagle, was held up in customs but arrived: a political metaphor for our times. A certain Dmitry, from the Russian city of Kazan, asked me to trust him to transfer the money blindly and he sent me the ones from Helsinki 52 and Munich 72. There is no excitement without risk. I suppose that is how drugs begin.
The hobby was turning into a nocturnal vice. I would look at medals and medals on my iPad before going to bed; they would stay embedded under my eyelids like a merry-go-round at dawn: a strange Olympic fever. The one from Sydney 2000 came from Belarus. The one from Atlanta 96 I bought in Temple, United States. I hunted for Mexico 68 and Barcelona 92 on Wallapop. Finally I found the one from Montreal 76 in good condition, located in Cambridge. I bought Seoul 88 from a German seller. And in all this crazy process an illusion hovered over me. A moment that could happen. I longed for it; in part I feared it. And it came.
I found the first Olympic medal ever won by a participant: Athens 1896. The first in history. It was like new in its round maroon box. With its Greek characters, its laurel wreath, the goddess Athena between the Parthenon and the Phoenix. All history in its bronze. One hundred and twenty-five years later it was waiting for me in a coin shop in Athens. Intact. For me. A big whim. Maybe too much. What was I going to do?
Jim Greensfelder, the Michael Phelps of Olympic collecting, experienced a moment like this.
Let’s play stories now.
There is a collector’s Olympism. It is based on four main branches: pins, stuffed mascots, medals and torches. The by-products are tickets, posters, programs, coins, stamps and other kinds of memorabiliaJim became famous for collecting participant medals. All of them. From the Summer Games and the Winter Games. Every possible variation of each medal. Hundreds of medals with their boxes. But one day he found out something. Something he longed for and feared. It was his moment.
It turns out that at the 1912 Stockholm Games two solid gold participant medals were made: one for the king, the other for the prince of Sweden. However, the chairman of the organizing committee had a third one made for himself. There is always someone clever. Time passed, his descendants sold it, and one day it appeared at an auction house. Jim could buy it for $300,000.
If he bought it, it was embezzlement.
If I didn’t do it, I would never have all the medals.
Jim chose a third option: to sell his entire collection and, with the proceeds, pay for his grandchildren’s education. End of story. Jim died last year in Cincinnati at the age of 83. End of collection.
There is something ineffable that drives the collecting impulse. To order chaos. To live the dream. To inhabit the useless. To fantasize about eternity. To feel gusts of childhood. They are all impossible, of course. For something similar to that we collect Olympic moments. The arrow of the cauldron in the Barcelona of the dream team. The Son of the Wind flying over Los Angeles. The 10 in Montreal of a little communist who never smiled. The Nazi arms folded by Jesse Owens. The amputees of the Second World War competing in London. The gymnast George Eyser, with a wooden leg, hanging six medals in St. Louis. The triple gold of Zatopek in Helsinki before being purged in Prague. The bare feet of the Ethiopian Bikila dominating post-imperial Rome. Two black fists in the sky of Mexico. The windblown hair of Florence Griffith in Seoul. The golden Nikes of the fastest duck in Atlanta. The smile of the flying blond fish in Beijing. The overwhelming power of Simone Biles to fly in Rio and to choose to get off afterwards. The charisma of Duplantis with the pole vault in the race for 6.02 in Tokyo.
That is the collection that opens this week. The stickers of an intangible album. Membranes of Olympic memory made of dreams, childhood, eternity. All impossible. Like that first medal, the one from 1896.
I have it between my fingers. How beautiful it is.
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