10 Roubles Judo

Issued as part of the USSR's official Olympic program coinage for the Moscow 1980 Games, this piece belongs to a series that the Soviet government used as a hard currency earner rather than a domestic circulation instrument. Foreign collectors and tourists were the intended buyers — Soviet citizens had little practical access to such issues. Judo was included in the series despite the sport's Japanese origins, a fact the Soviet sports apparatus quietly overlooked given the USSR's strong competitive record in the discipline since its Olympic introduction at Tokyo 1964.