Bob Beamon: The famous athlete sells his historic gold medal

It was the leap across the century and it’s still an Olympic record, but the American Bob Beamon it will be separated gold medal he won in Olympic Games of Mexico the 1968after “flying” to eight meters and 90 centimeters.

The medal will be auctioned on Thursday in New York by Christie’s, which values ​​it between 400,000 and 600,000 dollarscausing excitement among collectors everywhere, who are prepared to pay millions to acquire memorabilia of legendary sporting moments.

“I am 77 years old. I took advantage of it. And the time has come to give it to someone who appreciates athletic achievement” – which took place on October 18, 1968 at the University Olympic Stadium in Mexico City – said Bob Beamon in a telephone interview with AFP, when asked why he decided to part with this famous medal.

“This auction is a great way to present the medal, but also to preserve its memory,” he adds, imagining that the buyer, either a collector or an institution, will want to “display” it in the run-up to the Paris Olympics.

Bob Beamon remembers as a “excellent day» that October 18th. Reaching the final at the last moment, after two bad attempts in the qualifier, the athlete wanted to make a valid jump.

“To my great surprise, it wasn’t just a successful jump, it was a incredible moment in history“, he recalls and adds: “Everything was perfect, the wind was perfect, the weather was perfect.”

The historic jump was measured at 8.90 m. and it was 55 (!) cm better than the previous one, while we had to wait until the world championships in Tokyo in 1991 and Mike Powell’s legendary duel with Carl Lewis, to be broken, with Powell’s 8.95m. However, 55 years after Mexico and while 13 Olympic Games have intervened, the 8.90m. it remains an Olympic record.

The Mexico Olympics were marked by the gesture of American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who were banned for life from the Olympics for raising their black-gloved fists on the 200m podium in protest against discrimination against of African Americans in the United States.

The next day, Bob Beamon took the podium, black socks visibly pulled up and also raised his fist, in a similar gesture.

Today, the famous American rediscovered his passion for the music that excites him. Bob Beamon returned to drums and percussion, which he had given up as a teenager, “because sports came before everything else.” Born in Queens, New York, Robert Beamon was less than a year old when his mother died of tuberculosis and he never met his father.

“My luck,” he says today, is that I recorded an album with a jazz, funk, hip-hop band called +Stix bones and the bone squad+. And I’m having a lot of fun”…