10 Dollars Montréal Olympics, Shot Put

One of 28 silver — and in this case, copper — issues released by the Royal Canadian Mint to fund the 1976 Montréal Games, these Olympic coins were sold through a subscription program that raised hundreds of millions of dollars toward construction costs that ultimately ballooned to nearly $1.5 billion CAD, leaving Montréal taxpayers servicing the debt until 2006.

The copper composition is the anomaly worth noting. The overwhelming majority of the series was struck in sterling silver; the pure copper variants were a separate collector issue, not intended for circulation, produced in smaller numbers and frequently housed in the official series cases.