Silver medal of man who misplaced to Jesse Owens sells for $488K

On Saturday evening, Carl Ludwig Hermann “Luz” Lengthy’s males’s lengthy bounce silver medal from the 1936 Berlin Olympics offered for $488,435 with SCP Auctions — making the German’s essentially the most precious silver medal ever offered at public public sale. Lengthy was killed in 1943 whereas serving within the German military.

Lengthy and American Jesse Owens’ friendship, solid on the Berlin Olympics, is one among sport’s most enduring photos. As Jeremy Schaap just lately wrote, the Third Reich turned the 1936 Olympics into “a pageant of German would possibly.” After Owens set an Olympic males’s lengthy bounce document, Lengthy embraced Owens earlier than strolling arm-in-arm in entrance of a crowd of 110,000 — together with Adolf Hitler.

“It took plenty of braveness for him to befriend me in entrance of Hitler,” Owens stated afterward. “You possibly can soften down all of the medals and cups I’ve they usually would not be a plating on the 24-karat friendship that I felt for Luz Lengthy at that second.”

The costliest Olympic medal ever offered, unsurprisingly, is one among 4 Jesse Owens golds from the identical Olympics. In 2013, an Owens gold offered for $1,466,574, additionally by way of SCP Auctions — a document for a gold medal and a then-record for piece of Olympic memorabilia. (The document for an merchandise of Olympic memorabilia now belongs to the unique Olympic Manifesto, offered by Sotheby’s in late 2019 for $8.8 million.)

Per David Kohler, president and CEO of SCP Auctions, the earlier record-high sale for a silver medal was “underneath $100,000.”