The 1892 Manifesto Outlining the Modern Olympics Just Sold for $8.8 Million at Sotheby’s, Almost 9 Times Its Estimate

A new record was set yesterday
in a Sotheby’s New York salesroom as three international bidders
competed for lot 173, an original manuscript written by Pierre de
Coubertin outlining the modern revival of the Olympic Games. The
12-minute bidding battle resulted in an anonymous victor winning
the manuscript and breaking the world auction record for sports
memorabilia. 

Originally estimated at $1
million, the 14-page manuscript sold for an astounding $8.8
million. The previous world auction record for sports memorabilia
was held by a Babe
Ruth Yankees jersey that
sold for $5.64 million earlier this year (the record before that
also belonged to the Bambino, for a 1920 jersey that sold for $4.4
million).

The sale set a personal record
for the auctioneer, too, who has never hammered numbers quite this
high in his 30-plus years of book and manuscript sales. “It was a
personal honor to serve as today’s auctioneer, as this marks my
highest price on the rostrum in more than three decades at
Sotheby’s,” Selby Kiffer, senior specialist in Sotheby’s Books &
Manuscripts Department, said in a statement.

The sale marked the first time
the manifesto was publicly exhibited. Coubertin, a French
aristocratic sports fan, wrote the manifesto in 1892 as a speech
outlining his desire to revive the ancient Olympic Games as a
modern and international athletic competition. This is the only
known copy of the text, which materialized in the first modern
Olympics being organized a few years later, in Athens in
1896.

“It is clear that the telegraph,
railways, the telephone, the passionate research in science,
congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty
or diplomatic convention,” Coubertin wrote in his manifesto. “Well,
I hope that athletics will do even more. Those who have seen 30,000
people running through the rain to attend a football match will not
think that I am exaggerating. Let us export rowers, runners and
fencers; this is the free trade of the future, and the day that it
is introduced into the everyday existence of old Europe, the cause
of peace will receive new and powerful support.”

The post The 1892 Manifesto Outlining the Modern Olympics
Just Sold for $8.8 Million at Sotheby’s, Almost 9 Times Its
Estimate appeared first on artnet News.