Olympic Manifesto Brings Record Price

(ATR) Mystery buyer pays record $8,806,500 for Olympic Manifesto by Pierre de Coubertin in a New York auction.

The Olympic world is abuzz over the sale of the 14-page handwritten and autographed manuscript at Sotheby’s, which carried an estimate of only $700,000-$1 million. It 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.

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 earlier this month.

While the Olympic Museum would be a worthy repository for the Coubertin manifesto, sources tell Around the Rings that the IOC did not buy it.

Sotheby’s said there were three international bidders involved in spirited bidding for 12 minutes.

Speculation has zeroed in on China, which will host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games and has many new and passionate collectors, and Qatar, another country with deep pockets that has an an Olympic museum and interest in hosting a future Olympiad. Or did the winner come from France, home of Coubertin and host of the 2024 Paris Games?

There is hope that whoever secured the nearly 5,000-word manuscript will display it.

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.

Written by Karen Rosen

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