Modern Pentathlon 50p (2011)

Modern Pentathlon sits around the middle of the London 2012 set for mintage, so worn coins are easy to come by and sell for a small premium. Condition decides where a coin falls: look for sharp goggles on the swimmer, clean spikes in the splash and a clear outline on each of the four figures behind. Brilliant uncirculated coins from the Royal Mint's Modern Pentathlon coin card or coin cover sell above circulated ones, and more again in untouched packaging.

With 1,689,500 struck for circulation, the Modern Pentathlon 50p is the fourteenth rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 58th lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Scarce band, for mintages 1,000,000 to 2,499,999.

The next rarer 50p is the Handball 50p, with 1,676,500 struck, and the next more common is the Mrs Tittlemouse 50p, with 1,700,000 struck.

This is the coin with five sports on it, so it is hard to mistake. The swimmer's capped head and goggles sit just above 50 PENCE, facing out of the coin, and a jagged splash fills the middle. Behind it, pick out a fencer with a sword on the left, a runner, a raised pistol at the top right and a horse leaping on the right. The logo carries the Olympic rings, and no pentathlon varieties have been recorded.

Daniel Brittain had just finished university when his father came home from work having heard on the radio that an Olympic coin design competition had been launched. He looked it up and started sketching that same afternoon. He picked the modern pentathlon for the challenge of getting five sports onto a single coin: fencing, swimming, riding, shooting and running. He wanted one movement to carry all five, and the answer came from a picture he found online of a swimmer with a big splash behind him. Playing the image back and forth in his head, he saw a horse leaping out of the water, jotted it down and then built in the other three events. On the finished reverse a swimmer in cap and goggles comes straight towards you through the waves. Rising behind, like shadows out of spray drawn in sharp upward spikes, are the fencer, the runner and the shooter, all turned to the left, while the horse faces the other way.

It was one of the 30 coins in the Olympic set issued in 2011.