Michael Phelps, Shaun White Had Prizes Go Missing; When an eBay Knockoff Will Do
By STU WOO and GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
Chicago White Sox shortstop Alexei Ramirez won gold for Cuba’s baseball team in 2004. But he lost the medal when he moved to Chicago. Losing an Olympic medal is more common than you might think, but getting a replacement can be an Olympian task.
When Dutch rower Diederik Simon arrived at an Athens beach party during the 2004 Olympics, he noticed something missing from his pocket: the silver medal he had just won. “I was panicking, and I didn’t tell anybody,” he says.
Mr. Simon spent the celebration quietly searching for his medal. Before midnight, though, he gave up and went to the police station. Filling out a lost-property report, the officer asked him, “What color was the lost item? Ah, yes, silver.”
In the coming days, Olympians at the London Games will win about 3,000 medals, each the culmination of years of hard work. And in a moment’s carelessness, a few of those medals will be lost, perhaps as soon as the medal celebration itself.
Chicago White SoxAlexei Ramirez’s gold medal replica.
After winning gold in the 1988 Seoul Games, Italian rower Davide Tizzano made the traditional leap into the water. Then a teammate jumped on him, jarring the medal from his hand. It sank to the muddy bottom of the Han River.
“I feel exactly like it was yesterday, the feeling of the medal going down, going down,” he says. For the team picture, he borrowed a medal from another Italian rowing team that won gold. A security guard who was also a diver eventually recovered the hardware.
It is up to the Olympic host countries to make the medals, which are typically alloys. Organizers of the London Games say their gold medals, which weigh just under a pound, are actually 92.5% silver and just 1.34% gold. The remainder is copper.
Journal Report
Read the complete Olympics Preview report.
Losing a medal happens more often than one might think. Snowboarder Shaun White once found one of his gold medals, which he has admitted to misplacing a few times, in a seat pocket of his mother’s car. Another time, his mom had taken the medal to the dry cleaner—the ribbon was dirty—and had forgotten about it.
It can be harder to keep track of multiple medals. Swimmer Michael Phelps recently admitted that he was a little foggy about where one of his 16 medals was located. “There are a couple of options of where it could be, but I think when we were traveling—uh, somebody was holding on to it,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.”
The police can sometimes solve medal mysteries. Tristan Gale, a skeleton-racing champion at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, had her gold stolen by burglars last year. She recalls visiting San Diego-area pawn shops and asking, “Hi, I’m looking for an Olympic gold medal.” It took police a week to recover the medal. They busted three thieves, who pleaded guilty.
Mr. Simon, the Dutch rower, grew nervous with each passing day about a planned photo-op with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. “I didn’t want to be standing there without a medal,” he says.
A taxi driver found the award in his cab and, after taking photos with it, turned it in. Athens officials gave him his own medal ceremony with Mr. Simon, as well as a set of commemorative stamps.
It is hard for thieves to pawn a medal since it is easy to identify the award’s rightful owner. Athletes can sell their own medals, but Olympic officials frown on the idea. In a 2010 sale from Heritage Auctions, of Dallas, a gold medal from the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey team fetched $310,700.
For athletes who don’t find their missing awards, the International Olympic Committee does offer replicas.
The IOC keeps medal molds from modern Games in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, a spokeswoman says. She adds the organization, which has 34,237 medalists in its database, gets one or two replacement requests every year. The replacements have the word replica on them, usually in tiny print on the bottom edge.
The U.S. Olympic Committee says replicas generally cost the athlete between $500 and $1,200, depending on the intricacy of the design.
Getting an Olympic replica takes months. Alexei Ramirez, a Chicago White Sox shortstop who won gold for Cuba’s baseball team in 2004, says someone stole his medal as he and his wife relocated to the U.S. The White Sox sent the IOC a police report and payment this past spring. Two months later, the team received the new medal—without a strap, since the IOC doesn’t supply replica ribbons—via DHL and surprised Mr. Ramirez with an on-field presentation.
Mr. Ramirez says he keeps his replica in a safe place, but he won’t say exactly where. “That’s a secret,” he says. “I’m not going to tell anybody to make sure it doesn’t get stolen again.”
Some Olympians don’t like talking about their absent-minded moment. Glenn Eller, a shotgun shooter who won gold in Beijing, says only that someone took it while he was out with colleagues in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 2008. “I put myself in a situation that I probably shouldn’t have been in, and someone stole it out of my pocket,” he says. “I’m trying to forget it and go ahead.” He has since received a replica.
Olympic officials warn it can be tough to replicate certain medals if they contain materials other than metal. U.S. water polo goalie Merrill Moses, who had his silver from the 2008 Beijing Games stolen in a burglary of his parents’ house, says his replica medal contained jade that looked painted on, rather than a piece embedded in the back.
Mr. Moses returned that replica to Olympic officials, who told him they found a way to make a better one. In the meantime, he is toting around something else: a $75 knockoff silver medal he bought on eBay. “I do a lot of camps and clinics…and the kids want to see a medal,” Mr. Moses says, adding that he tells them it isn’t the real thing.
Before there was an official process for getting replacement medals, athletes made do with makeshift ones. Olympics historian David Wallechinsky says Canadian high jumper Duncan McNaughton lost his 1932 gold medal. So his friend Bob Van Osdel—the high-jump runner-up who happened to be a dentist—made a mold from his silver medal, filled it with gold and sent the replica to Mr. McNaughton, the historian says.
Corey Codgell, a shotgun shooter who won bronze in Beijing, doesn’t take any chances. She usually keeps her nicked-up medal in her front pocket when she travels. Before letting an audience at an event handle it, she warns everybody: “No one leaves this room until I get my medal back.”
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-TU249_olympi_NS_20120717122900.jpg){kind=small}
Streaming Coverage: Get the latest Journal coverage of the 2012 Games right here – every story, video, photo or tweet related to the competition and all news off the field.
Plus, watch video, see photos and view a schedule of events at WSJ.com/Olympics.
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com and Geoffrey A. Fowler atgeoffrey.fowler@wsj.com
Enjoy the Games! -
![[refinance]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-BP578_refina_DV_20120617172748.jpg)
European Pressphoto AgencyHUD Secretary Shaun Donovan says there is ‘essentially a monopoly on refinancings’ among the largest banks.
![[REFINANCE]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-BP567_REFINA_NS_20120617174809.jpg)
© 2013 The Peral Group