by The press release came through last week, publicizing Thursday’s sale of Olympic memorabilia at the RR auction house in Boston, USA. There is an Olympic torch from Berlin 1936, a postcard signed by Jesse Owens, a wooden clock from Amsterdam ’28, a media pass from Tokyo ’64, and, among them all, one complete set of medals.
Bronze, silver and gold from Munich ’72: they have a diameter of 66mm and are 5mm thick, an image of the goddess Nike engraved on one side, the twin gods Castor and Pollux on the other, and they weigh 175g, the last 6g of gold plating. Currently, the starting bid for the trio is $8,985 (£7,090). Which are cheap because of what they cost the owner. So why sell?
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For the past 50 years, Steve Genter has kept those three coins in a small knitted purse. Every five or six years someone will ask: “Hey, do you still have them?” ‘Yup,’ Genter will say. ‘Would you like to see them?’ The answer is always: ‘Hell, yes!’” But after holding them for a minute, what they really want is the story behind them. That’s where the real value is.
It goes like this. Genter was 21 in 1972 and on the swim team at UCLA. He started the sport when he was 10 years old and his parents enrolled him in the program at the local YMCA in Long Beach, California. The truth is, he didn’t have all that talent. His coach had to jump in and rescue him when Genter looked his first length and tried to kick him a year later. Genter tells a story about being the third reserve for a relay. The three swimmers in front of him got sick and when the coach told his teammates that he was putting Genter in, they insisted that they would not interfere with the racing as well.
The coach decided that Genter should take the last leg so that if the team lost it would be clear whose fault it was. He swam better than ever and they won. “I was a kid,” he says, “who didn’t know the word ‘quit’.”
The first time Genter made the national team the coach refused to pick him because he said he didn’t deserve it. So Genter trained harder. At the Olympic trials he came down with a high fever the night before the championships and still ended up qualifying in the 200m and 400m freestyle. Which meant he would be competing with, and against, Mark Spitz, who was aiming to become the first athlete in history to win seven gold medals at a single Games. Spitz, Genter says, didn’t think he was much of a threat. “I would say I was more like a distraction.”
But in Munich, Genter found that his times were far down. He had no wind and his lungs felt slushy. One day he left training and took himself off to the doctor, walking extra slowly to hide his shortness of breath from his rivals. “Does it hurt?” asked the doctor. “Except when I’m breathing,” laughed Genter. The doctor didn’t think it was funny. Turned out that Genter had a collapsed lung. By the end of the day, he was in the hospital. His 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, practicing his arms on a sling above his head. He refused all medication, even anaesthetic, because he was worried he would eventually fail the drug test, so when they removed his chest tube they used “four strong men” to hold him down on the table . By the fifth night, he was back in the pool, a fresh set of stitches in his chest, the doctors watching him, anxiously. They told him he was crazy. But he came second behind Spitz in the heats for the 200m freestyle the following morning.
Spitz tried to talk him out of the competition in the final. He told him it wasn’t worth the risk. Genter thought it was a game. “Look, Marquis,” he told him, “there’s one gold medal on the line tonight, and I’m coming for it, so watch your back.”
Qualifying was hell, but Genter told himself it couldn’t get any worse. It was wrong. That night, he was ahead of Spitz coming into the last turn when his stitches were ripped open in the water. He swam most of the last 100m in a pool and only remembers the last 10m, when he arrived and found himself racing Werner Lampe for the money.
Spitz finished ahead of them both in a world record time of 1 minute 52.78 seconds. Two days later, Genter beat that time himself on the third stage of swimming in the United States winning a gold medal in the 4x200m.
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The bronze medal he won in the 400m freestyle a day later may be my favorite of the medals. The gold went to his 16-year-old teammate Rick DeMont. But DeMont was concerned when he discovered that his asthma prescription medication contained a banned substance. DeMont had announced this before the Games, just as he was supposed to, but as the US Olympic Committee later admitted, the paperwork had been bungled by the team doctors.
When the IOC told Genter to hand in his bronze medal so they could replace it with a silver medal, he refused on principle. As far as it was concerned, DeMont beat him fair and square.
The authorities did not take that too well. They spent a few months chasing him, and Genter, who was stubborn as a mule, refused to obey him, so they banned him from competing. After all, why does a man sell his coins? That’s a story too, but one he’s not ready to tell. “The time is right,” he says.
The money is going to support a cause that is very important to him. So it goes. The buyer can hold them, weigh them, even take them out every now and then, just like Genter used to do. But no matter how much they pay, they will never have the special thing.
