The press release came through last week, publicising Thursday’s sale of Olympic memorabilia 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, among them all, one complete set of medals.
A bronze, a silver and a gold from Munich ’72: they have a 66mm diameter 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 the gold plating. Right now, the leading bid is $8,985 (£7,090) for the three. Which is cheap given what they cost the owner. So why sell?
For the past 50 years, Steve Genter has kept those three medals in a little knitted purse. Every five or six years someone will ask: “Hey, do you still have them?” ‘Yup,’ Genter will say. ‘Do you want to see them?’ The answer is always: ‘Hell, yes!’” But once they have held 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 in the swimming team at UCLA. He took up the sport when he was 10 and his parents signed him up to the programme at the local YMCA in Long Beach, California. Truth is, he didn’t have all that much talent. His coach very nearly had to jump in and rescue him when Genter tried his first length and tried to kick him off the team a year later. Genter tells a story about being third reserve for a relay. The three swimmers ahead of him came down sick and when the coach told his teammates he was putting Genter in they argued they may as well not bother racing.
The coach decided 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 ended up winning. “I was,” he says, “a kid who just didn’t know the word ‘quit’.”
The first time Genter made a 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 championship and still ended up qualifying in the 200m and 400m freestyle. Which meant he would be competing with, and against, Mark Spitz, who was making a play to become the first athlete in history to win seven gold medals at one Games. Spitz, Genter says, didn’t think he was much of a threat. “I’d say I was more like a distraction.”
But in Munich, Genter found his times were way down. He didn’t have any wind and his lungs felt slushy. One day he left training and took himself off to the doctor, walking extra slow 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. Turned out Genter had a collapsed lung. By the end of the day, he was in hospital. His Olympics were over before they had even started.
At least, that’s what the doctors told him. Genter had other ideas. He spent the next five days flat in bed, exercising his arms on a sling above his head. He refused all medication, even anaesthetics, because he was worried he would end up failing a drugs test, so when they removed his chest tube they used “four burly men” to hold him down on the table. By the fifth night, he was back in the pool, a fresh row of stitches in his chest, the doctors watching on, anxiously. They told him he was crazy. But he came in second behind Spitz in the heats for the 200m freestyle the next morning.
Spitz tried to talk him out of competing in the final. He told him the risk wasn’t worth it. Genter reckoned it was gamesmanship. “Look, Mark,” he told him, “there’s one gold medal on the line tonight, and I’m coming for it, so watch your back.”
Qualifying had been hell, but Genter told himself it couldn’t get any worse. He was wrong. That night, he was leading Spitz coming into the last turn when his stitches ripped open in the water. He swam most of the last 100m in a blackout and can’t remember any of it except the last 10m, when he came to and found himself racing Werner Lampe for the silver.
Spitz finished ahead of them both in a world record 1min 52.78sec. Two days later, Genter beat that time himself on the third leg of the USA’s gold-medal-winning swim in the 4x200m.
My favourite of the medals, though, may just be the bronze he won in the 400m freestyle a day later. The gold went to his 16-year-old teammate Rick DeMont. But DeMont had it taken away when it turned out his prescription asthma medication included a banned substance. DeMont had declared this before the Games, just like he was supposed to, but as the US Olympic Committee later admitted, the team doctors had bungled the paperwork.
When the IOC told Genter to give in his bronze medal so they could replace it with a silver one, he refused to do it on a point of principle. As far as he was concerned, DeMont had beaten him fair and square.
The authorities didn’t take too well to that. They spent a few months chasing him, and Genter, stubborn as a mule, refused to give in, so they ended up banning him from competing. After all that, why does a man sell his medals? That’s a story too, but one he isn’t ready to tell. “The time is right,” he says.
The money is going to support a cause that matters very much to him. So it goes. Whoever buys them can hold them, weigh them, even take them out to show them off every now and then, just like Genter used to do. But however much they pay, they’ll never own the thing that makes them special.
