The press release came last week, announcing the sale of Olympic memorabilia on Thursday at the RR auction house in Boston, USA. There’s an Olympic torch from Berlin 1936, a postcard signed by Jesse Owens, a wooden clog from Amsterdam ’28, a media pass from Tokyo ’64, and a full set of medals among them.
One bronze, one silver and one gold from Munich ’72: 66 mm in diameter and 5 mm thick, engraved with the image of the goddess Nike on one side and the twin gods Castor and Pollux on the other, and weigh 175 grams. The last 6g gold plated. Currently, the highest bid for all three stands at $8,985 (£7,090). This is cheap considering the cost to the owner. So why should we sell?
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For the past 50 years, Steve Genter has kept these three medals in a small mesh bag. Every five or six years someone asks: “Hey, do you still have these?” Genter will say ‘Yes’. ‘Do you want to see them?’ The answer is always: ‘Hell yeah!’” But when they hold them for a minute, what they really want is the story behind them. The real value is there.
It continues like this. Genter was 21 years old in 1972 and was on the swim team at UCLA. He took up the sport when he was 10 years old, and his parents enrolled him in the local YMCA program in Long Beach, California. The truth was, he wasn’t that talented. His coach almost had to jump in and save him when Genter attempted his first long and tried to kick him off the team a year later. Genter tells a story about being third reserve for the relay. Three swimmers ahead of him got sick, and when the coach told his teammates he was adding Genter to the team, they argued they shouldn’t bother competing.
The coach decided that Genter should take the final leg so that if the team lost, it would be clear whose fault it was. He swam better than ever and they eventually won. “I was,” he says, “a kid who didn’t know the word ‘let go’.”
When Genter was first selected for the national team, the coach refused to select him because he said he did not deserve it. So Genter worked harder. At the Olympic trials, he came down with a high fever the night before the championships and still qualified in the 200m and 400m freestyle. This meant he would compete with and compete against Mark Spitz, who was vying to become the first athlete in history to win seven gold medals at one Games. Genter says he doesn’t think Spitz poses much of a threat. “I’d say I’m more of a distraction.”
However, in Munich Genter realized that his time was too low. There was no wind and his lungs felt watery. One day, he left practice and took himself to the doctor, walking extra slowly to hide his shortness of breath from his competitors. “Does it hurt?” the doctor asked. “Only when I breathe,” Genter laughed. The doctor didn’t think it was funny. It turned out that Genter’s lung collapsed. By the end of the day he was in the hospital. The Olympics were over before they even started.
At least that’s what the doctors told him. Genter had other ideas. He spent the next five days lying in bed, exercising his arms in a sling above his head. He refused all medication, even anesthesia, because he was worried he would fail a drug test, so when they removed his chest tube they used “four burly men” to lay him on the table. He returned to the pool on the fifth night, a new row of stitches on his chest and doctors watching anxiously. They told him he was crazy. However, he finished second to Spitz in the 200 m freestyle heats the next morning.
Spitz tried to dissuade him from competing in the final. He said it wasn’t worth the risk. Genter thought it was playfulness. “Look, Mark,” she told him, “there’s a gold medal at stake tonight and I’m coming for it, so watch your back.”
Qualifying was hell, but Genter told himself it couldn’t get any worse. He was wrong. That night, as he was leading Spitz through the final corner, his seams came open in the water. He swam most of the last 100 meters during the power outage, and when he came to he remembers none of it except the last 10 meters where he found himself competing for the silver medal with Werner Lampe.
Spitz finished ahead of both of them with a world record time of 1 minute, 52.78 seconds. Two days later, Genter beat that time himself in the third leg of the swimming meet, where the United States won gold in the 4×200 meters.
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My favorite among the medals might be the bronze medal he won in the 400-meter freestyle the day after. The gold medal went to his 16-year-old teammate Rick DeMont. However, DeMont had his prescription asthma medication taken away after it was revealed that it contained a banned substance. DeMont had announced this before the Games, just as he should have, but as the U.S. Olympic Committee later admitted, team doctors had mixed up the paperwork.
When the IOC told Genter to hand over his bronze medal so that it could exchange it for a silver medal, Genter refused to do so on principle. In his opinion, DeMont had beaten him fair and square.
The authorities did not react positively to this. They chased him for several months and Genter, stubborn as a mule, refused to give up and they eventually banned him from racing. After all, why would a man sell his medals? This is a story too, but it’s not ready to tell yet. “It’s time,” he says.
The money will support a cause that is very important to him. Then he goes. The person who buys them can hold them, weigh them, and even take them out occasionally to show off, just like Genter did. But no matter how much they pay, they will never have what makes them special.