Antiques Roadshow guest stunned at value of grandmother's 100-year-old Olympic medal
Antiques Roadshow had a medal from the Paris Olympics being appraised, though of course not the ones currently going on right now.
Paris also hosted the Olympic Games 100 years ago, so when a woman named Julia went on the show with her grandmother's gold medal from Paris '24 they weren't treating the current games as a place for antiques.
Antiques Roadshow expert Adam Schoon's socks were practically knocked off when Julia shared the gold medal her grandmother Lucy Morton had won in a swimming event a century ago.
Advert
She recounted that the family moved to Blackpool shortly after Lucy was born and by age 10 she was in an amateur swimming club.
By 1920 she held the world record for the 200 yard breaststroke and got a spot in Team GB for the 1924 Olympics in Paris.
Julia said that her grandmother was the first woman to win a gold medal in an individual swimming event for Team GB at the Olympics, and that medal she won was worth quite a bit 100 years later.
"It's got her name on the rim, it is the gold but it's made of silver, silver gilt," the expert said of the medals handed out in Paris 1924.
"It was designed in Paris by a man called Andre Rivaud, it was made in the Paris mint and there were only 304 made as far as I know."
He then gave the Olympic gold medal a valuation of £15,000, leaving Julia quite stunned at that value for one medal before the expert continued.
Since Julia had brought along her grandmother's other medals in her collection she could have received around £15,000 for those as well bringing Lucy Morton's medal collection to around £30,000 in total.
According to her Olympic biography, Lucy had missed out on the chance to compete in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, as there were no breaststroke or backstroke events for women at those games.
Four years later in Paris she would win gold in the 200 metres breaststroke, earning herself the medal which would later end up on Antiques Roadshow.
At the time she competed in the Paris Olympics, Lucy was also working in St Anne's Post Office.
She returned to a hero's welcome where 10,000 people showed up to greet the gold medal winner, who was gifted a piano as a prize.
Lucy retired from competitive swimming after the Olympics and would go on to marry Post Office clerk Harry Heaton, while she would stay involved with the sport of swimming for the rest of her life.
Topics: Antiques Roadshow, Olympics, Sport, TV and Film, Money
Joe Harker