1924 Paris Olympic games Guy Butler Olympic Games bronze third-place prize medal

1924 Paris Olympic games Guy Butler Olympic Games bronze third-place prize medal, designed by Andre Rivaud, circular form, for the 400m, the obverse with a winning athlete coming to the aid of a fallen colleague above the Olympic rings emblem, the reverse with an assortment of sporting equipment around a legend VIII EME OLYMPIADE PARIS 1924, diameter 55mm., 72gr., good, clean condition with little wear 

The following lot 68 and lots 173 to 189 relate to the career of Guy Butler.  

The medals and ephemera awarded to Guy Butler, winner of four Olympic medals including a Gold at the 1920 Games, Britain’s most bemedaled Olympic athlete of all time, a distinction shared since 1984 with Sebastian Coe, Christine Ohuruogu and Mo Farah. 

Guy Montagu Butler was born in Harrow, his father Edward Montagu Butler a former first-class cricketer for Middlesex and housemaster of The Park. Following early education at Heatherdown prep school, near Ascot, Guy Butler entered The Park in 1913 and captained the cricket and football sides.  

He first made his mark on the national scene in the 1917 Public Schools Championships when he won the 100 yards (with Harold Abrahams unplaced six yards behind), 440 yards and long jump, defeating Abrahams by half an inch with his final leap. A year after joining the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1919, by which time he was the AAA 440 yards champion. In addition to his 4 x 400 metre relay gold medal at the 1920 Olympic Games, achieved with team-mates Cecil Griffiths, Robert Lindsay and John Ainsworth-Davis in 3m 22.2s on 23 August, he finished second in the 1920 Olympic 400 metres, won by his great rival, the South African Bevil Rudd, on a rain-sodden track against the cream of the world’s quarter-milling talent on 20 August. Despite competing with a strained thigh muscle, forcing him to employ standing starts, Butler reached new heights at the Paris Olympics of 1924. Setting an unofficial European record of 48.0 in his semi-final, he gave it everything in the final, staged in the evening of the same day. Second to his inspired team-mate Eric Liddell for much of the race, he eventually placed third in 48.6.  such a magnificent achievement however, it did not get the acclaim and merit it deserved. It was overlooked in the excitement surrounding Liddell’s victory. Butler claimed another medal in the 4 x 400 metre relay, his team recording 3m 17.4s and claiming a bronze. An athlete who never quite fulfilled his potential due to various injuries and nerves. Harold Abrahams once wrote, “Ill-luck and a rather wayward temperament played their part in robbing him of distinctions which were well within his capabilities, and had he not been so successful when he was so young he might have been very much more so later on.” One of Butler’s best performances came in 1926 when, a week after winning the Amateur Athletic Association 220 yards in a personal best of 21.9, he equalled the world record of 30.6 for 300 yards. He ended his active career at the 1928 Olympic Games, when he became the first British track and field athlete to compete in three Olympics, but where he was eliminated in the second round of the 200 metres. He went on to make valuable contributions to British athletics in many ways. He advised on the design of the White City stadium, where he was athletics manager. He became a successful coach (guiding Alistair McCorquodale to fourth place in the 1948 Olympic Games 100 metres), lectured and wrote widely on the sport, serving as the athletics correspondent of the Morning Post until its merger with the Daily Telegraph in 1937, and became Britain’s foremost producer of coaching films and loops. In World War II he worked at the Foreign Office and was a Lieutenant in the Bedfordshire Regiment. He was inducted into the England Athletics Hall of Fame in 2014.