The figure of 8.8 million dollars for de Coubertin’s text broke the record for sports memorabilia previously held by the jersey of the American baseball icon Babe Ruth from the New York Yankees, sold last June by Hunt Auctions for 5.6 million dollars.
A record the French baron who reinvented the Olympics might have commented on with, “The important thing is not … to participate, but to … win.”
In the document, a 14-page autograph text of the speech delivered by de Coubertin on November 25, 1892, at the Sorbonne in Paris for the fifth anniversary of the French Athletics Association, the baron highlighted his desire to revive the ancient Greek Olympic Games with an international sports competition.
Two years after this speech, in 1894, de Coubertin himself founded the International Olympic Committee, paving the way for the first games in 1896, held in Athens.
In the document, as explained by Sotheby’s auction house, there is also a study on the state of athletics in countries such as Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, and other parts of the world, to show that the sporting effort was no longer aimed primarily at military training, but had evolved towards the pursuit of individual excellence with both personal and social benefits.
The document disappeared for several decades after the death of Pierre de Coubertin in 1937 in Geneva. In the early 1990s, François d’Amat, a scholar passionate about the life of the French baron, found traces of the “Olympic manifesto” in Switzerland, where a collector had kept it in a safe.
The buyer is not known at this time!
