The gold medal won by Cuban taekwondo athlete Ángel Valodia Matos at the 2000 Sydney Olympics received a final bid of $51,620 in a new auction on-line from the American house RR Auction, based in Boston, whose bidding session closed on Thursday.
The gold medal won by Matos in the 80-kilogram division was the fourth most valuable of the competition, with the lot on offer containing 183 Olympic items, including four other medals won by athletes from the island in different Olympic competitions.
The 47-year-old Cuban athlete, who participated in three Summer Olympics between 2000 and 2008, won gold, but this time it was a long way from the record held by boxer Roniel Iglesias, who won two gold medals.
In January, her gold medal, won at the 2012 London Olympics, was sold for $83,133 by RR Auction House.
With the amount of that medal, the welterweight equaled the amount he obtained with the medal won in Tokyo 2020, also negotiated in the same Boston entity for 83,108 dollars.
That same one rally In terms of sales, the silver medal won by boxer Carlos Banteux at the 2008 Beijing Games in the 69-kilogram division was also sold, but for $25,000.
Now, in the ranking of Cuban medals auctioned, Matos’ medal occupies fifth place.
Until now, the only Olympic champion of Cuban taekwondo, Matos is also sadly remembered for his kick on a referee at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“It’s something I regret to this day, because I didn’t want my sports career to end like this,” the athlete, originally from the eastern province of Holguín, confessed ten years later in an interview with the website. Havana Times.
Other athletes “auctioned”
The list, which is already a trend among Olympic gold medalists, includes the gunman Leuris Pupo, London 2012, who recorded a final sale of $73,205 in 2021, and the jumper Iván Pedroso, now famous as a trainer of world luminaries, with $71,335, in Sydney 2000.
Another gold medal from Cuban sports was also sold in the new auction by RR Auction for $21,588. It belonged to a member of the baseball team that won the Athens 2004 championship, but its original owner was not revealed.
Meanwhile, the silver medal won by Greco-Roman Yasmani Lugo in the 98-kilogram division in Rio de Janeiro 2015 was auctioned for $26,121.
Also, two Cuban baseball silver medals, one from Sydney and one from Beijing, both also from unknown winners, were on offer, but the official auction site did not offer information on the final amount, the newspaper reported. place CubaNews360.
Last December, boxer Mario Kindelán, Olympic champion in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, said that he traveled to Bahrain, at the beginning of 2023, in search of economic improvements for himself and his family.
As he told the media TalkSport His rival from Athens 2004, the British Amir Khan, Kindelan tried to sell him his gold medal won in the Greek capital for 5 thousand dollars. Khan refused and gave him the money, asking him never to sell the medal.
Olympic titles of Leuris Pupo and Iván Pedroso sold for more than 70,000 dollars
“I was hurt when he told me he had no money, so I gave him some cash. Then he said, ‘Do you want to buy my gold medal?’ At first I thought he was joking, but he said, ‘I really want to sell you my gold medal so I can build a house for my mother, the family is very poor and I want to build a house for her,’” Khan said.
