A rare winner's medal from the only Olympic final ever held in Scotland is to be sold soon in Glasgow. McTear's Auctioneers will put the 1908 yachting medal under the hammer on 4 March.
   A couple of years ago I wrote about the 12-metre yacht race won by the Hera on 11 and 12 August 1908. Skippered by Thomas Glen-Coats MP with a crew of ten, it held off the challenge of the Mouchette to take gold - although only the skipper's medal was actually gold. The crew members each received a silver medal, and it is one of these that is being auctioned.
   Unfortunately, McTear's don't give any provenance for the medal so it is not possible to say which of the crew it originally belonged to. They estimate it will sell for around £3-5,000.

Update: hammer price was £3,400

An interesting little project for a Danish speaker would be a translation of these books by Carl Hansen into English. The Danish international joined Rangers in 1921 and spent three years in Scotland, one of the earliest foreigners to play here. He was widely known in Denmark as Carl Skomager (or Skoma'r), ie shoemaker. 
   I've picked up enough Danish watching the likes of Borgen and The Bridge to work out some anecdotes in his life, and he goes into great detail about his time in Scotland. He arrived at Leith on the boat without speaking any English other than 'Yes' or 'No', to be met by Rangers manager Bill Struth who drove him to Glasgow. He made his debut in some style against Queen's Park at Hampden, scoring a hat trick in a 3-2 win on 22 November 1921 (it was a match in the Lord Provost's Rent Relief Cup). However, he never really established himself as first choice, playing just 23 league matches over three seasons, with a broken leg effectively ending his career.
   His time at Rangers was influential enough for him to choose an aerial photo of Ibrox on his autobiography Et liv i fodbold (A life in football) which came out in 1954. The stadium is packed, but there is nobody on the pitch, and the picture seems to have  been taken during a sports meeting.
   More poignantly, in 1945 he had published a much darker volume Carl Skomager i tysk Faengsel (in a German prison) which details his wartime experiences, including four months imprisonment by the Nazis. When arrested he was taken to Kastellet, the old fortress in Copenhagen, having already been beaten up. Putting his bleeding hand into his trouser pocket he felt a small badge which he knew he had to get rid of, and surreptitiously threw it into the fireplace: 'Det var Scottish Football-Associations Maerke, og havde Tyskerne funded det paa mig, var det sikkert blevet mig en dyr Historie'. (It was a Scottish Football Association badge, and if the Germans had found it on me, there would certainly have been more blood in this story).  So, perhaps somewhere in this Danish castle, a little SFA badge or medal lies waiting to be discovered!
   

There's nothing an author likes better than a good review for one of his books, so I am deeply grateful to Victoria Dawson of De Montfort University for her comments on First Elevens in the latest edition of Sport in History - an academic journal produced by the British Society of Sports History.
   She says that my book "presents the story of the origin of international football in absorbing, well-crafted prose, suitable for both academic historians and wider sports fans alike," and will be "a valuable reference source by football scholars in years to come."  She concludes: "First Elevens is a passionate, fascinating portrayal of the origins of international football."
   Thanks, Victoria! You can read the full review here.
   And of course the book is still on sale, either a signed copy directly from me via this website, or from Amazon.

Looking into the history of Scottish Olympic gold medal winners recently, I was sidetracked by the life of Launceston Elliot, who won gold at the very first Olympics in 1896 for the single-handed lift. Although the wrestler and strong man is generally regarded as Scottish because of his family background, and is in the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame, he never lived in Scotland.
   He was born in 1874 in the small Indian town of Kaladgi, now in Karnataka but at that time under the Bombay Presidency; his father was magistrate and collector there. The town is currently under threat of being submerged because of the Almatti Dam project, but that is another story.
   Elliot came to England as a teenager when his father retired, and travelled under his own steam to compete at Athens. His life is well told in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography (click for link).
   He ran a farm called Highfield at Mottingham in Kent, but when he (or rather his father) hit financial problems in 1903 he was forced to cash in on his strength and turned professional. He got involved in product endorsement, and his name appeared next to adverts for Cadbury's Cocoa: "I find nothing so refreshing and nourishing after a severe feat of strength".
   He also went on the stage, and this took him to Scotland, probably for the first time. He made an 'important appearance and first engagement' at Aberdeen in August 1903.
   He took his act as far as South America, but returned to Scotland in 1908. The 'magnificently developed and proportioned British Hercules' performed twice nightly at the Palace Theatres in Aberdeen and Dundee, part of a nationwide chain of music halls. What tickled me was the advert for his show on Saturday 8 February 1908, which was 'Under the Patronage of the Aberdeen Football Club'. Quite why the football club should have gone into the music hall business is not explained.
   He left Britain behind for good in 1923 and died in Melbourne seven years later - his grave was refurbished a couple of years ago. Whether he can really be hailed as a Scottish sporting hero is open to question, given his limited connection to the country, but by all accounts he was a proud Scot. 
He was certainly a fascinating character.