5 Roubles Swimming

One of several collector issues produced for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, this piece was struck two years before the Games opened — part of a phased release program the Soviet government used to generate hard currency from Western collectors and dealers. The USSR ran one of the most commercially aggressive Olympic coin programs of the modern era, with issues spanning multiple denominations and metals across several annual tranches throughout the late 1970s.

The 1980 Games themselves were boycotted by 65 nations following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, meaning much of this series was marketed internationally in the shadow of a diplomatic crisis that gutted attendance at the actual event.