Fencing Chief Donates Coubertin Relic

(ATR) No longer anonymous: the buyer who spent $8.8 million for original writings of Pierre de Coubertin.

Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov, also president of the International Fencing Federation, has revealed he is the person who spent $8.8 million for the writings at an auction in December.

On Monday, Usmanov presented the manuscript to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne.

The winning bid is the most money ever paid for an item of sport memorabilia, much less Olympic-related artifacts.

The 14-page handwritten and autographed manuscript was written in 1892 and was the basis for the Coubertin speech at the Sorbonne in Paris which called for the revival of the Olympic Games.

Sotheby’s estimated prior to the Dec. 21 that the manuscript would fetch from $700,000 to $1 million.

The bidding at the auction in New York was said to have been between three bidders. It was over in 12 minutes.

The hammer price smashed the previous world record for a piece of sports memorabilia, which was $5.4 million for a New York Yankees jersey worn by the legendary Babe Ruth. It also more than doubled the top price for a sporting document: the founding rules for basketball, handwritten by James Naismith, sold for $4.33 million in 2010.

In terms of most valuable Olympic memorabilia, the manuscript relegated a Jesse Owens gold medal to a distant second place. That medal sold for $1,466,574 in 2013, while another of the four Owens gold medals went for only $615,000 in December.

Olympic memorabilia dealer Ingrid O’Neil told ATR there was justification for the auction price being so much higher than that paid for the first Owens gold medal.

"It blew it away because of the importance," she said. "This is the beginning of the modern Olympic Games, put in writing by Coubertin."

The Olympic founder wrote many notes in the margins as he fleshed out his ideas. However, he did not publish the manifesto and no one knew where it was when he died in 1937.

Marquis Francois d’Amat of France began searching for the manuscript in 1990, going so far as to search flea markets across Europe and the United States. Finally, a manuscript dealer arranged a meeting for him with a collector in Switzerland, who agreed to sell him the coveted document.

The IOC published the manifesto in English and French in 1994 to celebrate its centennial. A copy was displayed in China in 2007 (the original was too fragile) and it was also published in Chinese.

A copy of the manifesto also was displayed in Copenhagen City Hall during the 2009 Olympic Congress. However, the original had never been shown publicly until the Sotheby’s auction.

Reported by Ed Hula and Karen Rosen.