An original 1913 drawing of the Olympic rings by modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin was sold via a French auction house for $216,000 on Sunday.
A Brazilian collector paid 185,000 euros, with an extra 27 percent added for a total of more than $275,000, according to the auction house.
De Coubertin had the idea to revive the Olympic Games. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896. In 1913, the rings were first unveiled. They debuted at the Olympics in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium, as part of the Olympic Flag.
They are a symbol of global unity — five interlocking rings — blue, yellow, black, green and red — representing the union of five continents: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe. It is said that at least one of the five colors appears in the flag of every nation of the world.
Last December, the Olympic Manifesto, Coubertin’s 1892 document that outlined the revival of the Olympics, was sold for $8,806,500 to a Russian billionaire who then donated it to the IOC.
It was the highest sale price ever for a piece of sports memorabilia, according to Sotheby’s, shattering the $5.4 million for a Babe Ruth New York Yankees jersey. It went for more than 8.5 times its $1 million high estimate, following a 12-minute bidding battle.
The manifesto went missing during the World Wars. In the 1990s, the Marquis d’Amat of France “scoured flea markets” in Europe and the U.S., tracking it down from a collector in Switzerland, according to the IOC.
Coubertin gave his heart to the Olympic Movement — it rests inside a monument at the ancient Olympic site of Olympia.
MORE: From Zeus to Athens, how the modern Olympics came to be
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!
Follow @nbcolympictalk
In 2018, Lena Schroeder became the second woman to participate in a Paralympic hockey tournament, and the first in 24 years.
She hopes to return for a second Paralympic Games for Norway in 2022, but another part of her life takes precedent: working as a doctor, and recently fighting the coronavirus in a hospital outside Oslo.
“My plan is to continue to play hockey as long as I can,” the 27-year-old Schroeder said. “If I find out that I’m not as skilled as I was, or I can’t work out as much as I think I should, then that would be a problem. I would probably be forced to quit [hockey].”
In PyeongChang, Schroeder was on the ice for 5 minutes, 13 seconds, in one game for Norway, which finished fifth of eight teams.
The Paralympic hockey tournament is technically mixed gender, since there is no separate women’s event. Before Schroeder, no woman participated since fellow Norwegian Brit Mjaasund Oejen at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games.
Schroeder became a story in South Korea. She was featured by the BBC, Agence France-Presse (the national news agency of France) and Marca, a leading Spanish daily sports newspaper.
A nation receives an extra roster spot for a female player, but she would have earned a place on the team without the exception, Norway’s coach said.
“We said all the way that Lena was being picked for the team because of her skill level and not because she was a female,” Espen Hegde said earlier this month. “She was there as our No. 14 or 15 [skater out of 16] on the roster, but she was there on the same level as the guys.”
Schroeder, born with spina bifida, played violin for nine years but gave it up once she discovered hockey for the first time at age 15 in 2008. She soon began playing in local games with some men from the national team. By 2011, coaches knew about her and she took part in a more organized session with the national team.
“But I wasn’t ready for it,” she said. “I was too slow, and I couldn’t keep up with the guys. I had it as a personal goal to make it onto the national team. I was constantly working to get on the team.”
Schroeder seized her next chance in a 2013 tryout and made the team. She played her first game for Norway in 2014.
“We expected a smart and skillful player,” Hegde said, “and she was able to live up to those expectations.”
PyeongChang was historic, but could have been even more memorable. She spent more time doing interviews than on the ice in games.
“I wasn’t as essential to the team that I want to be,” she said. “It was great at that time, but I would really like to contribute some more to the team.”
That happened at the 2019 World Championship. Schroeder played every game, partially due to her improvement and partially because of other skaters’ injuries. Norway again finished fifth, the top-ranked team of those that missed the medal round.
“She deserved more minutes on the ice,” Hegde said.
Schroeder played all those games with the national team while taking medical school classes at the University of Oslo, or while putting them off to pursue the Paralympics. After seven years, she became a doctor last Dec. 13 (and had a game to play later that night).
An already busy life accelerated this year. She went from working as a nurse and lab assistant in a private clinic to a doctor in the cardiology ward of Akershus University Hospital on the outskirts of Oslo in April. She had planned to spend that month with the national team, preparing and playing at the European Championships, which were canceled due to the pandemic.
Then she moved to the ER for 13-hour shifts, helping identify patients who may have the coronavirus, as first reported by Paralympic.org.
“They needed extra people in the hospital because of Covid-19,” she said. “I was a bit of a wreck the first week or two, then, gradually, I began to understand my role.”
Schroeder, after finishing shifts and shedding PPE, works out as much as possible. She gathered with the national team earlier this month.
“I really want to continue playing hockey, but they know as well as I know that it’s going to be hard working so much,” she said.
The coaching staff accepts Schroeder will train less but struck a deal to keep her in mind once competition resumes.
“We’ve talked to her about her speed, which has been her biggest obstacle as a player,” said Hegde, who is now the general manager. “Of course, being a female competing with guys who are stronger, she needs to compensate by being smarter and more skillful. I’m really not worried about her smartness or her technique, but we told her, if you want to pursue being a doctor, that’s fine with us, but you need to work on your speed.”
Schroeder embraced the challenge.
“If me working as much as I do in the hospital doesn’t negatively affect my skills on the ice, then I’ll be able to play,” she said.
MORE: How the Olympics, Paralympics intersected over time
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!
Follow @nzaccardi
DÜSSELDORF, Germany (AP) — Olympic athletes competing for gold medals in a world reeling from a pandemic? It won’t be the first time.
A century before the Tokyo Games were postponed because of coronavirus, the Olympics were held in the Belgian city of Antwerp following the Spanish flu pandemic.
The 1920 Games were meant to symbolize a recovery from World War I, not a health crisis. Belgium, a battleground for the opposing powers, was the host country and the five rings of the Olympic Flag flew at an opening ceremony for the first time.
“They released doves, although these were not necessarily doves of peace, because these were doves which had served in the war and they were released by military men,” Roland Renson, a Belgian sports historian, told The Associated Press.
Both the pandemic and the war were epitomized by Aileen Riggin, a 14-year-old American diver who won a gold medal.
Riggin first took up competitive swimming after becoming sick with the Spanish flu, and she went on a tour of a World War I battlefield after winning gold on the springboard. She took a German helmet and some bullets as souvenirs, but got a shock when she examined one of the many boots lying in the churned-up mud.
“I picked up one that had a foot in it, so I dropped it in a hurry,” she recalled later.
The coronavirus has blocked Antwerp’s attempt to mark the centenary. A ceremony in March due to feature the King of Belgium and the president of the International Olympic Committee was canceled.
Despite taking place in the wake of a major war, reconciliation at the Antwerp Olympics had its limits. Germany and its wartime allies didn’t compete, nor did Bolshevik-controlled Russia. They weren’t officially banned, simply not invited. One Swedish figure skater (then in the Summer Olympics before the Winter Games started in 1924) was reportedly forbidden from performing to German music.
There were financial problems, too. Ingenious shortcuts like making a pool from a ditch in the city fortifications — Riggin and other athletes hated the cold, dark water — helped keep costs down, but the Belgian organizing committee still lost money and left behind unpaid debt.
“Antwerp has never cherished its Olympic heritage because of the debacle,” Renson said.
The postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 is estimated to cost Japan at least $2 billion.
The Spanish flu swept around the world from 1918 until early 1920, killing an estimated 50 million people, though war and poverty made a precise count impossible.
Older people make up a large share of the coronavirus death toll, but the Spanish flu was a particular threat to younger people. That included the soldiers gathered in often squalid conditions as WWI ended. The flu-infected troops in France and Belgium and then hitched a ride when they were demobilized. Parties to welcome soldiers home became infection hot spots.
Seven Olympic athletes are believed to have died from the Spanish flu, according to records provided by Olympic historian and physician Bill Mallon.
They include three WWI veterans as well as Martin Sheridan, a New York policeman who was born in Ireland and won gold medals for the United States in the discus and shot put over multiple early Olympics.
“This flag dips to no earthly king,” Sheridan reportedly said at the 1908 London Olympics when the U.S. team refused to lower its flag in a sign of respect to the British royal family. The comment was first published decades later and its veracity is disputed, but the United States continues the tradition of not dipping the flag at Olympic ceremonies.
Mallon and other researchers have identified 48 cases of COVID-19 among Olympians, with 19 deaths attributed to the disease.
For Belgium, the Spanish flu was another setback to rebuilding after the devastation of WWI. However, Renson said he has not found any direct impact from the pandemic on Olympic preparations.
The Antwerp Olympics were meant to mark new beginnings, but many traditions from before the war remained.
Athletes had to be amateurs, but that rule often meant mediocre competitions between wealthy gentlemen. Working-class people were alienated and many events were poorly attended, with the exception of soccer.
Belgians loved cycling but snubbed the Olympic races for more exciting professional events, Renson said. Some sailing classes had only one entry, meaning the crew simply had to finish to earn a gold medal.
Times were changing, though. It was the Olympic debut for Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi, whose scientific approach to training and race strategy helped him to nine gold medals in his career, including three in Antwerp. Sports were increasingly a full-time occupation, even if that meant bending the rules on amateurism.
“The American rowing team, these were all Navy men and they trained every day. So you can ask questions whether they were amateurs or not,” Renson said. “Amateurism was a means to exclude working-class people, simple as that. Paavo Nurmi was not a saint. He was a pure professional.”
The 1920 Olympics excluded many women, too. Two years later, female athletes staged their own breakaway Women’s Olympic Games. That eventually forced the International Olympic Committee to move closer to gender equality.
Many Olympic champions from 1920 are little remembered today, but the games were a symbolic resurrection of sports in adversity.
“In a minimum of time, they organized the games, but they were relatively improvised games,” Renson said. “They had to do it with the means they had at their disposal, and they were at that time far from abundant in a city so heavily hit by war.”
MORE: Original drawing of Olympic Rings sells for more than $200,000
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!
"original" - Google News
July 28, 2020 at 12:03AM
https://ift.tt/339ACzU
Original drawing of Olympic Rings sells for more than $200,000 - Home of the Olympic Channel
"original" - Google News
https://ift.tt/32ik0C4
https://ift.tt/35ryK4M
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Original drawing of Olympic Rings sells for more than $200,000 - Home of the Olympic Channel"
Post a Comment