Awards of one of the city's first track and field champions ended up in the Novgorod Museum-Reserve
The collection of the Novgorod Museum-Reserve has been replenished with a set of sports tokens from pre-revolutionary Russia. Sports were just developing at that time, and medals were not a widespread type of award. Tokens informing that a person had won a prize in a sports competition were more common at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, Novgorod was a quiet and small city, social life in it developed slowly, and sports - even more so. Let's even assume that running in underwear along the streets seemed indecent to ordinary people. Therefore, any find of a sign or medal associated with the pre-revolutionary era is very interesting and important for historians. Nothing like this had ever been in the museum before. The entire set that Novgorod historians received consists of 5 items, 2 of which definitely belonged to one person - high school student Pyotr Osinovsky. Most likely, all these tokens were part of his collection. At the beginning of the 20th century, he was fond of amateur sports, participated in competitions, received prize awards and was a member of the Novgorod Sports Circle (NSC). A professional look at the items suggests that the first of the presented tokens were not "designed" at the factory. On the earliest of them, from January 1911, the engraving was done by hand on a blank.
The museum clarified that the tokens were purchased in an antique shop, where they were received from a Krasnoyarsk antique dealer who had previously bought them from a private individual in Yekaterinburg.
Let us add that the personality of Pyotr Osinovsky also appears in other sources related to the NSC.
It should be noted that this champion could well have been Novgorod native Pyotr Pavlovich Osinovsky (born in 1892), about whom the Pamyat Naroda website knows that he was called up in August 1941 by the Vasileostrovsky military registration and enlistment office and demobilized with the rank of senior lieutenant in 1946 in the Far East. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star (2nd degree), the medals "For the Defense of Leningrad" and "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."
By the way, few people know, but the history of Novgorod athletics had its own star. Silver medalist of the 1976 Olympics Evgeny Mironov. The strongman (193 cm, 133 kg) was born in Staraya Russa in 1949 and was engaged in shot put. In addition to the Olympic silver, he has 2 gold medals of the USSR championships.
Novgorod
