Shooting 50p (2011)

Fewer Shooting coins were struck than for most London 2012 designs, although it is not one of the scarcest, so a worn example sells a little above the common sports. Condition matters most: look for crisp edges on the flying shards and fine detail in the ear defenders and the shooter's hands. Brilliant uncirculated coins in the Royal Mint's Shooting coin card or coin cover are worth more than circulated ones, especially if the pack is still sealed.

With 1,656,500 struck for circulation, the Shooting 50p is the eleventh rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 54th 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 Goalball 50p, with 1,615,500 struck, and the next more common is the Taekwondo 50p, with 1,664,000 struck.

The shooter fills the lower left of the coin in profile, wearing ear defenders and glasses, with the gun barrel pointing towards the upper right. Flat, angular pieces of the broken clay are scattered around the end of the barrel and up to the edge. The Modern Pentathlon 50p also has a shooter, but only as a small pistol-holding figure among several others. The logo shows the Olympic rings, and the clay shooter design has no recorded varieties.

Pravin Dewdhory heard about the competition from a friend who knew he was interested in coins; he even keeps a 1920s till in his living room, stuffed with all sorts of things. As a graphic designer living in Hackney next to the Olympic Park, he had spent years beside the building site, and the bold geometric graphics on the hoardings around it caught his eye. His idea was to tie a sport to that branding. Shooting suited it because a clay target, shattering when hit, could break into the same segmented, angular shapes as the 2012 logo. He took the style of the hoardings and moulded it into his exploding clay. On the reverse a shooter in glasses, a visor and ear protection holds a shotgun to the shoulder and aims up to the right, and the clay has already burst into sharp-edged shards scattering towards the rim. The jagged London 2012 logo sits beside the debris, so the fragments read as part of the same design.

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