Wheelchair Rugby 50p (2011)

By mintage, Wheelchair Rugby is a mid-table coin in the London 2012 set, so circulated examples are common and condition drives the price. The textured wheel, the player's hands and the ball are the places to inspect for wear, and the background lines should stay crisp rather than merging together. Uncirculated coins from the Royal Mint's Wheelchair Rugby coin card or coin cover command more than change finds, particularly in unopened packaging.

With 1,765,500 struck for circulation, the Wheelchair Rugby 50p is the 21st rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 66th 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 Sailing 50p, with 1,749,500 struck, and the next more common is the Hockey 50p, with 1,773,500 struck.

The player fills almost the whole coin, leaning forward in the chair with a hand gripping a large wheel at the lower left and the ball resting in the lap. Fine horizontal lines cover the background. Check the logo: it shows the three Paralympic agitos and the words Paralympic Games instead of the Olympic rings. No varieties of the wheelchair design are recorded.

Natasha Ratcliffe loves coins and medals, so when the competition appeared in the press she saw it as a fantastic opportunity. Two of her designs went into production, Wheelchair Rugby and Handball. Looking through the sports, she was drawn to wheelchair rugby by the pictures she found: chairs crashing into one another, players tipped out, dented wheel covers and hands strapped up. It struck her as raw, organic and full of energy. She had no background in the sport and knew no one who played it, so she worked from photographs and images, and decided that it came down to a few things every player shares: muscle, hands and determination in the face. She chose to zoom in on those and push everything else out of the coin. The reverse is a tight view of one player, a hand on the wheel and the ball held on the lap, cropped so that only the lower part of the face shows, against a background of horizontal lines.

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