Breal's Silver Cup
The silver cup given to Louis at the first modern Olympic Games staged in Athens in 1896, was sold for 541,250 pounds ($860,000) in London on 18 April 2012, breaking the auction record for Olympic memorabilia. Breal's Silver Cup stands just six inches tall and was offered for sale at Christie's by the grandson of the victor.
Christie's called the auction "heated" and involved six bidders. The auctioneer later confirmed the buyer as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which plans to build a major cultural center in Athens, where the Olympic cup will go on display from 2015. The item was sold on the day Britain marked the 100 days' countdown to the 2012 London Olympics.
Read more about this topic: Spyridon Louis
Famous quotes containing the words silver and/or cup:
“I cease my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the grey-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo aroused in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Sunday morning may be cheery enough, with its extra cup of coffee and litter of Sunday newspapers, but there is always hanging over it the ominous threat of 3 P.M., when the sun gets around to the back windows and life stops dead in its tracks.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)