From The Experts: The Marvelous Olympics

By David Thomason Alexander, Senior Numismatist

If you attract any number of collectors to a field that is new to them, the effects can be dramatic. Olympic coins and medals are such a field, still mysterious to most collectors but uniquely appealing. The Krause-Mishler Coins of the World 20^th Century Issues covers Olympic coinage well but there is still no comprehensive reference to medals of the modern Olympic games. Even so, interest in Olympic medals has attracted a whole sub-set of enthusiastic collectors, many of whom collect no other categories of numismatic objects.                 

Now a familiar part of each Olympiad (the term for the 4-year interval leading up to the Games themselves), the Winter games only began in 1924 at Chamonix, France. In 1932 the winter events took place in Lake Placid, New York, which had been a fast-developing resort during the Roaring Twenties and the high years of Coolidge Prosperity.

Lot 6183 in the Stack’s Bowers August American Numismatic Association Convention Sale was an Uncirculated example of a highly elusive Participant’s Medal bestowed on athletes taking part. Struck by Medallic Art Co. as a tapering rectangle with sloping sides the medal measured 60 x 445 millimeters. The obverse presented the standing figure of winged Fame blowing her trumpet. The reverse bore six shields portraying Olympic sports over a landscape of the Lake Placid site.

Once thought of as a mere souvenir of the Games, this medal is now appreciated as a significant rarity and a record of the third Winter Olympic held in what was then a remote village in upstate New York. P.S., this medal realized $4,888 in the ANA Sale.