As the 2026 Winter Olympics give global attention to Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, a quiet but historically charged period is revealing a few countries in the north. Denmark’s Bruun Rasmussen is bringing to auction the first silver medal since the 1896 Athens Games—the first Olympics of the modern era. Objects from the first Olympics are rarely seen, but when they are, they carry weight that goes beyond sporting memorabilia into cultural and institutional history.
The importance of the medal begins with what the 1896 Games represented. After the abolition of the ancient Olympics in 393 CE by Emperor Theodosius I after more than a thousand years of competition, this tradition remained dormant for more than 1,500 years. Their revival in Athens under the leadership of Pierre de Coubertin and the newly formed International Olympic Committee was an ambitious test of international cooperation. The Games of the I Olympiad brought together 241 athletes from 14 nations, competing in nine sports and 43 events. Although the participants in the 1896 Summer Olympics were all male, mostly European and mostly Greek, the medal for sale is nonetheless a living testament to the pivotal moment in history that laid the foundation for the Olympics as we know them today.
It was created by the French artist Jules-Clément Chaplain and built by Monnaie de ParisThe design of the medal is taken from classic images to ensure a modern Games with a classic example. Zeus appears on the obverse, crowned with laurel and holding a globe above Nike, while the background depicts the Acropolis and Parthenon, paired with a Greek inscription naming the Athens 1896 International Olympic Games.
Notably, in 1896, first place finishers received silver medals and second place finishers took home bronze. The standard gold-silver-copper sequence would not be introduced until 1904 and was used later only retroactively. As a result, these outstanding silver medals occupy a unique position: they are the medals of winners from before the Olympic standards were firmly established as a tradition, making them very different from those that followed. “Such medals are extremely rare, and for collectors of Olympic memorabilia, this is nothing short of a crown jewel,” said Christian Grundtvig, head of coins and medals at Bruun Rasmussen, in a statement.
The results of the auction show the strong demand for medals and other memorabilia from the classic and modern Games, with comparable examples of the medal continuing in the block fetching figures of six. In 2024, the first silver medal from 1896 fetched nearly $112,000 at an auction dedicated to Olympic memorabilia conducted by RR Auction. In 2014, another medal from 1896 (paired with an original postcard of the premiere) sold for $245,873 at Sotheby’s in London—possibly the highest price ever realized at auction for such art. Offered at an estimated pre-sale estimate of €26,000-40,000, the Bruun Rasmussen medal comes at a time of great Olympic awareness. Although it is not known who this medal was awarded to, it is nonetheless a tangible link to the origins of an institution that will define sports around the world.
More Olympics coverage:
