If there is an exciting intrigue, an unsolved mystery in the history of the World Cup, that is the final destination of the Jules Rimet Cup, the trophy raised from 1930 to 1970 by the winners of the World Cup.
The history of the Jules Rimet Cup is an exciting story that includes Nazis, dogs, petty thieves, gold traffickers and police versions, to say the least, curious.
This is how the first World Cup trophy was created
Its journey begins in 1928, when once the organization of the first World Cup was approved, the president of Fifa, Jules Rimet, commissioned a goldsmith friend, Abel Lafleur, to create a trophy in keeping with the magnitude of the event.
Lafleur receives 50,000 francs and sculpts a 14-carat gold-plated silver trophy on a lapis lazuli base. With 35 cm. tall and 3.8 kilos in weight, represented Nike, the goddess of victory.
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The cup travels under Rimet’s arm by boat to Montevideo, where it will be raised for the first time by Uruguayan captain José Nasazzi, after the sky-blue victory over Argentina in the final (4-2).
This is how they hid the Cup during World War II
Italy will be the next destination of the trophy until 1950. First for the Azzurra conquest of the 1934 and 38 World Cups. Later, because the outbreak of the Second World War caused the suspension of the 1942 and 1946 World Cups.
The story enters the field of legend from that moment and places the trophy in a shoe box under the bed of Ottorino Barassi, who would be president of the Italian Federation and vice president of Fifa, who takes it out of a bank in Rome in 1941 and takes it home, after verifying that it is the object of desire of the Nazis.
After the World War, the Fifa Congress held in Luxembourg adopts two decisions in 1946; the World Championship will be played again in 1950, in Brazil, and the tournament is renamed the Jules Rimet Cup, in honor of its promoter.
On the pitch of the Maracana, almost secretly, Rimet will present the trophy to the Uruguayan Obdulio Varela, once a ceremony that had only foreseen the Brazilians as champions had been cancelled.
From Uruguay it will go to Germany, champion thanks to the “Miracle of Bern” and, four years later, the unknowns return. According to the book by British journalists Jim Lynch and Joe Coyle, the study of the photographs of the time allows us to deduce that the trophy lifted in 1958, in Sweden, by the Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini, is 5 centimeters taller and shows evidence ; the base is octagonal and not square.
The mystery of the base was solved. After verifying that there were beginning to be space problems to inscribe the names of the champions on the square base (Uruguay 1930 and 50, Italy 1934 and 38), the original was replaced by an octagonal one.
Fifa announced in January 2015 that it had found the original square base in the basement of its headquarters and is now exhibiting it in its museum, but was only the base replaced?
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The theft of the Cup before the 1966 World Cup
The next chapter in the enigmatic adventures of this trophy is written in 1966, in England, when it is stolen four months before the start of the World Cup.
Exhibited in the Westminster Central Hall, as the main attraction to enhance a stamp exhibition, its theft and subsequent recovery is the script of a film that could well be signed by the British Guy Ritchie (Snatch: pigs and diamonds).
The room was owned by the Methodist church, which held services that Sunday, March 20. This caused security to be relaxed as well. The guard who was in charge of his direct custody had the day off, four others who had to remain in the room were having coffee and only a 70-year-old policeman remained there, who reported the robbery.
Three days later, with all of Scotland Yard searching for clues, the English Federation received a call asking for 15,000 pounds for the trophy. It was a fiasco, it was an impostor, a petty thief, Edward Betchley, who became the only detainee, despite assuring that he was only an intermediary.
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In the midst of national drama, a dog named Pickles found the cup a week later, wrapped in newspaper and half-hidden in a garden. Pickles became a hero and England captain Bobby Moore was able to lift it after beating Germany in the final.
But this “movie” also had its epilogue: the president of the English Federation, Joe Mears, died two weeks before the World Cup began -due to angina caused by tension-; the alleged thief Edward Betchley, died of pulmonary emphysema three years later -a year after leaving prison-, and “Pickles” appeared in 1967 hanged with his own strap in his owner’s garden, apparently after getting caught in a tree when was chasing a cat.
The sad end of the original trophy
The next episode in the eventful life of the Jules Rimet Cup takes place in 1983, in Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazilian Confederation has owned the trophy since 1970, when it won its third World Cup, and a manager of a bank with which the CBF works, Sergio Pereyra, knows how to steal it. In a bar in Santo Cristo, he contacts two thugs, José Luis “Mustache” Viera and Francisco “Barba” Rocha, who carry out the robbery, taking advantage of the display of the cup at the federative headquarters. They take him to the workshop of the Argentine Juan Carlos Hernández, who has a business of buying and selling gold of dubious origin.
Hernández, supposedly, melts the Cup to sell it in ingots, as he confesses after being arrested.
Years later, however, he will change his version and ensure that the theft occurred on behalf of an Italian collector, who would have paid $100,000. The Brazilian police will not give credibility to his story and will close the case.
It is not the end of the road. The winged Victory trophy will be talked about again when George Byrd dies in 1995, the jeweler to whom the English federation had commissioned a replica after the theft in 1966.
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The reproduction, in bronze with a gold plating, was auctioned by Sotheby’s by the jeweler’s family under the name: “Copy of the Jules Rimet Cup”. Surprisingly, an anonymous buyer bought it for 254,000 pounds, an exorbitant price.
Fifa will later admit that it was purchased on suspicion that it was the authentic one, since after giving it to Bobby Moore at the 1996 World Cup award ceremony, the original had been exchanged for the replica during the celebrations in London.
Although according to the official version, the cup was melted down and disappeared forever, the search for the trophy created by Abel Lafleur has become that of a soccer holy grail, because there are still people who wonder; What happened to the Jules Rimet Cup?
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