Manufacturers Custom Champion Boxing Medal for Sale

Extraordinary winner’s medal awarded to boxer Wilbert McClure as champion of the light middleweight division. The front depicts a victorious athlete being carried by a jubilant crowd; the reverse, inscribed, “Giochi Della XVII Olimpiade Roma MCMLX,” features a 'Seated Victory' with the Colosseum in the background. The medal is set in its original cast bronze olive leaf chain, inscribed at the bottom with the name of the sport in Italian, “Pugilato.” Complete with original presentation box; its cover, interior padding and some sides of the box are detached or loose. Includes a cardstock 10 x 8 photo of McClure with his fellow American 1960 Olympic boxing champions Cassius Clay and Eddie Crook, signed and inscribed in gold ink by McClure "To Dick R., Thanks, Skeeter." This medal was obtained directly from McClure in 2002 and this is the first time it has been publicly offered.



A boxer's son, McClure started sparring at 13, won two Golden Gloves, two AAUs, and had the pleasure of meeting a young Muhammad Ali in person. He was fighting with a busted right hand from his first Olympic match on. In the fourth and final fight against Italian Carmelo Bossis, McClure won on a 4-1 decision to give himself an honored place along with countrymen Cassius Clay and Eddie Crook on the medal stand. The following year saw 'Skeeter' turn pro en route to a career that ended in 1970. This is an extremely rare Olympic medal by any standard; aside from its intrinsic value as a 1960 boxing gold medalist alone, it bears unique historical significance among all such awards presented before or since then. The winner’s medals for the 1960 Rome Olympics were the first designed to be hung around one's neck — giving athletes free hands for further competitions while moving about crowded stadiums where earlier prizes required them to carry boxes or wear badges instead — and also marked initial occasion when details about which event it represented appeared on them. This is a boxing gold medal, the identical version of what was awarded to Cassius Clay as the first-place winner in the light heavyweight division. Only ten of these “Pugilato” medals were ever issued for the ten weight classes that competed in the 1960 Olympics. In both tremendous rarity and historical interest, this museum-quality medal is truly the standard for Olympic artifacts.