Steve Genter is selling his Olympic medals although their real value is how he won them

TThe press release came through last week promoting it Thursday sale of Olympic memorabilia at the RR Auction House in Boston, USA. There is an Olympic torch from Berlin 1936, a postcard signed by Jesse Owens, a wooden clog from Amsterdam ’28, a media pass from Tokyo ’64, and a complete set of medals, among other things.

A bronze, a silver and a gold from Munich ’72: they have a diameter of 66 mm and are 5 mm thick, an image of the goddess Nike engraved on one side, the twin gods Castor and Pollux on the other side, and they weigh 175 g, the last 6 g the gold plating. Currently the highest bid is $8,985 (£7,090) for the three. That’s cheap considering what they cost the owner. So why sell?

For the past fifty years, Steve Genter has kept these three medals in a small knitted bag. Every five or six years someone will ask, “Hey, do you still have them?” “Yes,” Genter will say. “Do you want to see them?” The answer is always, ‘Hell, yes!’” But once they’ve held them for a minute, what they actually want is the story behind it. That’s where the real value lies.

It goes like this. Genter was 21 in 1972 and on the UCLA swimming team. He took up the sport when he was 10 and his parents enrolled him in the program at the local YMCA in Long Beach, California. The truth is, he didn’t have that much talent. His coach almost had to jump in and save him when Genter tried his first length and tried to kick him off the team a year later. Genter tells a story about his third reserve for a relay. The three swimmers in front of him got sick and when the coach told his teammates he was bringing in Genter, they argued that they might as well not bother racing.

The coach decided that Genter should ride the last stage so that it would be clear whose fault it was if the team lost. He swam better than ever and in the end they won. “I was,” he says, “a kid who just didn’t know the word ‘stop’.”

The first time Genter made the national team, the coach refused to pick him because he said he didn’t deserve it. So Genter trained harder. At the Olympic trials he developed a high fever the night before the championship and still finished in qualifying for the 200 and 400 meter freestyle. That meant he would compete with and against Mark Spitz, who was attempting to become the first athlete in history to win seven gold medals in one Games. Spitz, Genter says, didn’t think he was much of a threat. “I would say I was more of a distraction.”

But in Munich, Genter noticed that his times were way down. He had no wind and his lungs felt muddy. One day he left training and went to the doctor, walking extra slowly to hide his shortness of breath from his competitors. “Does it hurt?” The doctor asked. “Only when I breathe,” Genter laughed. The doctor didn’t think it was funny. It turned out that Genter had a collapsed lung. At the end of the day he was in the hospital. His Olympics were over before they even started.

At least that’s what the doctors told him. Genter had other ideas. He spent the next five days flat in bed, with his arms attached to a sling above his head. He refused all medications, even narcotics, because he was afraid he would eventually fail a drug test. When they removed his chest tube, they used “four large men” to hold him down on the table. By the fifth night he was back in the pool, with a new row of stitches in his chest, as the doctors watched anxiously. They told him he was crazy. But he came second behind Spitz in the heats for the 200 meter freestyle the next morning.

Spitz tried to take him out of the final. He told him the risk wasn’t worth it. Genter thought it was gamesmanship. “Look, Mark,” he told him, “there’s one gold medal on the line tonight, and that’s what I’m here for, so watch out.”

Qualifying had been hell, but Genter told himself it couldn’t get any worse. He was wrong. That night he was leading Spitz entering the final turn when his stitches tore open in the water. He swam most of the last 100 meters in a blackout and has no memory of it except the last 10 meters, when he came to and raced Werner Lampe for silver.

Spitz finished ahead of both of them in a world record of 1 minute and 52.78 seconds. Two days later, Genter beat himself that time during the third leg of the American gold medal-winning 4x200m swimming meet.

My favorite among the medals may be the bronze he won a day later in the 400 meter freestyle. The gold went to his 16-year-old teammate Rick DeMont. But DeMont had it taken away when it turned out that his prescribed asthma medication contained a banned substance. DeMont had declared this before the Games, just as he should have, but as the U.S. Olympic Committee later admitted, the team doctors had tampered with the paperwork.

When the IOC told Genter to surrender his bronze medal so they could replace it with a silver one, he refused on principle. As far as he was concerned, DeMont had beaten him fair and square.

The authorities did not handle this very well. They continued to pursue him for a few months, and Genter, stubborn as a mule, refused to give in, so eventually they banned him from participating. After all, why does a man sell his medals? That is also a story, but a story he does not want to tell yet. “The time is right,” he says.

The money goes to a cause that is very important to him. That’s how it goes. Those who buy them can hold them, weigh them and occasionally even take them out to show them off, just like Genter used to do. But no matter how much they pay, they will never own the thing that makes them special.