Gary Hall Jr. Receives Replacement Olympic Medals in Swiss Ceremony
American sprinter Gary Hall Jr. lost the 10 Olympic medals he earned over a stellar career during wildfires that swept through Los Angeles in January.
Monday, he received replica medals as a replacement in a private ceremony at Olympic House at the International Olympic Committee’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hall met with outgoing IOC president Thomas Bach, who fulfilled a promise the IOC made in the immediate aftermath of the fire damage to replace Hall’s medals.
“I cannot thank the Olympic Movement enough for their support through this very difficult time,” Hall said in an IOC press release. “Their realisations through this process that outweigh the sense of loss and that is this word of solidarity and what it means: the value of friends outweighs the value of objects, and character cannot be taken away, it cannot be burned, it cannot be lost and what is inside of us, our spirit, our being, our soul – that is important. We live in a time of capitalism, consumerism and you realise when you lose everything how little of it you truly need.”
Hall, 50, is a second generation Olympian, his father Gary Hall Sr. also a three-time Olympian who won three medals. Hall won the 50 meter freestyle old at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, as well as silver in the 50 and 100 at the 1996 Games and silver in the 100 free in 2000. His relay medals include 400 medley and 400 free gold in Atlanta and 400 medley gold in Sydney. He added 400 free silver in Sydney and 400 free bronze in Athens.
All were destroyed when the Palisades fire swept through his home in the Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7. Hall and his dog have stayed in the San Diego area with friends, and he raised nearly $100,000 via a GoFundMe campaign. He brought to Lausanne a hunk of metal recovered from his home that was two of the medals fused together in the fire.
Among the possessions he now has back are totems of his swimming success in a career that stretched more than a decade.
“We really appreciate your presence here. I cannot tell you how much we admire you, not only because of the medals, but because when we were reading your tragic story of losing your house, your possessions and all your worldly properties, this went straight to our heart,” Bach said. “But even more so, when we learned how you overcame this tragedy in the style of a true Olympic champion, showing all the resilience, courage and confidence that you were known for as an athlete at the time, but you displayed under very different circumstances once more.”
