1939 World Figure Skating Medal: The Ladies of Prague.

Last Updated on August 22, 2026 by Netropolitan Museum

A skating souvenir at the crossroads of history

In mid-February 1939, the world’s finest female figure skaters—just 15 in all—gathered in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for a world championship that would prove to be much more than just another entry in the record books. Among the souvenirs of those 1939 World Figure Skating Championships is a participant medal, a small piece that today carries a surprisingly large amount of history. At the time, however, the skaters and spectators could hardly have known that they were witnessing the last World Championship competition before they would be plunged into war.

The ladies’ competition took place in Prague, while the men’s and pairs events had already been held a week prior in Budapest, Hungary. Megan Taylor of the United Kingdom defended her world title in Prague. Hedy Stenuf of the United States finished second, while Taylor’s British teammate Daphne Walker took third. Taylor’s victory was her second consecutive World title, following her 1938 championship in Stockholm.

Medal Gallery: 1939 World Figure Skating Championships

For a look back in time, The Netropolitan Museum of Figure Skating Pins has pulled the participant medal from its archives. Such pieces were produced in limited quantities and given only to participants and officials. That distinction is important to collectors: a participant medal can document the existence and character of an event just as effectively as a trophy or championship medal, while offering a very different glimpse into how the organizers chose to memorialize it.

The bronze-colored medal exhibits a striation across its surface that appears intentional rather than the result of a manufacturing defect or aging. A warm patina covers the metal, but light still catches the raised areas, giving the design a remarkable sense of depth. At its center, a female figure skater appears caught in mid-spin, her skirt floating above the waistline. The skating attire, along with the boots extending to mid-calf, immediately places the design in its 1930s setting. The period styling is part of the medal’s charm. This is not an abstract representation of skating; it depicts a very specific era of the sport. The skater’s costume, pose, and silhouette provide a tiny visual time capsule of how the sport was presented before the streamlined skating fashions of the postwar era.

Along the top of the medal is the event name, in Czech: “Mistrovství Světa v Krasobruslení Dam.” Beneath the wording, on the left, is a small skyline of Prague. Staggered to the right and left of the skater are the year and location: “1939” and “Praha.” As was sometimes the practice with international sporting souvenirs of the period, the event name appears again in another language, this time French: “Championnat du Monde de Patinage des Figures Pour Dames.” French remained an important language of international diplomacy and sporting administration, and multi-lingual inscriptions on older skating memorabilia are a reminder that these competitions operated in a distinctly European, multi-lingual world. A small maker’s mark appears above the French inscription.

Prague was an important and prosperous European capital, and the competition proceeded much as such events had for decades: skaters traveled internationally, judges evaluated their performances, spectators filled the stands, and souvenirs were produced to commemorate the occasion. Yet the political landscape was already shifting dramatically. Austria had been annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and the Munich Agreement had resulted in the loss of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland later that year. Just over a month after the skaters left Prague, that changing landscape would become impossible to ignore. On March 15, German troops entered Prague and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. The timing gives this particular competition an almost surreal place in history: the skaters were competing in a city that, within weeks, would look dramatically different from the one they had known during the championship.

For collectors, objects like the 1939 World Figure Skating Championships medal are a fitting memento of a competition held at a crossroads—not only in figure skating history, but in European history. The World Championships would disappear from the calendar for seven years, with the event not returning until 1947 in Stockholm. What makes this medal especially compelling is that it was created to commemorate an event that, at the time, seemed to belong to the present. We now know it belonged to the end of an era.

This blog was originally published at The Netropolitan Museum of Figure Skating Pins on July 3, 2021, and has been updated with new and expanded information.

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