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Eugenio Monti

Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy

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Eugenio Monti won Olympic gold medals in bobsled at the 1968 Grenoble Games at 40 years old, capping a career that had earlier produced Olympic silver and bronze medals along with multiple World Championship titles across nearly two decades at the top of the sport. Monti became famous for an act of sportsmanship at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, when he lent a spare bolt to a British competing team whose sled had broken during the competition, an act that likely cost Monti's own team the gold medal but that he later said he had no regrets about, viewing sportsmanship as more important than the medal itself. That gesture earned Monti the first-ever Pierre de Coubertin Medal for sportsmanship, an award created specifically to recognize exceptional acts of fair play in Olympic competition, and the story remains one of the most frequently cited examples of sportsmanship in Olympic history. His combined Olympic medals across four different Games, spanning nearly two decades of elite competition, along with his celebrated act of sportsmanship, have made Monti one of the most significant and beloved figures in the history of Olympic bobsled.

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