The Oldest Sports Trophies in the World, and Why the Answer Depends on the Question

Three questions, three answers

Ask which sports trophy is oldest and you will get different answers from equally reliable sources. They are not contradicting each other. They are answering different questions.

The question	The answer
Which trophy object is oldest?	Carlisle Bells — larger bell donated 1559
Which trophy is still competed for?	Antient Scorton Silver Arrow — 1673 (Guinness World Records)
Which international trophy is oldest?	America’s Cup — 1851

Before ranking anything, you have to say which of those you mean. Most articles on this subject do not, which is why they disagree.

The Carlisle Bells: the oldest objects

Two small silver bells, competed for at Carlisle in the north of England.

The larger was donated by Lady Dacre in 1559. It is 2½ inches across and carries an inscription in Tudor spelling:

“The sweftes horse thes bel to tak for mi lade Daker sake”

The swiftest horse this bell to take, for my Lady Dacre’s sake.

The smaller is inscribed 1599 with the initials H.B.M.C., believed to stand for Henry Baines, Mayor of Carlisle. The race itself was first contested in 1599.

They are, on any reasonable reading, the oldest surviving sporting trophies in the world. But there is a catch, and it is the reason Guinness recognises something else.

The originals are in a museum. The bells are on permanent display at Carlisle’s Guildhall Museum. They are brought to the racecourse each year on Bell and Plate Day, but the winning owner now receives replicas.

The Scorton Silver Arrow: still actually the prize

Guinness World Records recognises the Antient Scorton Silver Arrow as the oldest sports trophy still competed for, and the qualifying phrase is doing all the work.

“The oldest sports trophy still competed for is the Antient Scorton Silver Arrow (UK), which is 342 years old and has been offered as the prize in the Antient Silver Arrow Competition — an archery tournament held in Scorton, North Yorkshire, England, UK — on 307 occasions from 14 May 1673 to 16 May 2015.”

An archery prize, first offered on 14 May 1673, and still the actual object handed over. Not a replica. Not a museum piece brought out for photographs.

That distinction — between a trophy that survives and a trophy that is still awarded — is the entire difference between the two claims, and both records are correct within their own terms.

The wider timeline

Once you leave those two, the field is dramatically younger. Every trophy below is verified against its awarding body or competition record.

Trophy	Sport	Dates from
Carlisle Bells	Horse racing	1559 / 1599
Antient Scorton Silver Arrow	Archery	1673
America’s Cup	Sailing	1851
FA Cup	Football	1871
Claret Jug	Golf	1872
Scottish Cup	Football	1873
Calcutta Cup	Rugby union	1879
The Ashes	Cricket	1882–83
Stanley Cup	Ice hockey	1892 (first awarded 1893)

The gap is striking. Nearly two centuries separate the Scorton Arrow from the America’s Cup, and then almost everything else arrives in a forty-year burst between 1851 and 1892 — the period in which modern sport was codified, clubs were founded and competitions were formalised.

The trophies are a fossil record of that moment.

“Win it three times and keep it”

One convention recurs across the 19th-century trophies, and it explains why several famous prizes are not the original.

The Open Championship’s original prize was the Challenge Belt, presented by Prestwick Golf Club. Under the rules of the day, a player winning three consecutive Championships kept it outright. Young Tom Morris did exactly that in 1870 — so golf’s championship had no trophy, and the Claret Jug was created in 1872 to replace it.

The identical thing happened in football nearly a century later. Brazil won the Jules Rimet Trophy outright in 1970 under the same three-wins rule, and FIFA had to commission the trophy used today for 1974.

Two sports, a hundred years apart, made the same design error and fixed it the same way: the modern Claret Jug and the modern World Cup trophy both exist because somebody was allowed to take the old one home.

The Stanley Cup carries a trace of the same era in its name — commissioned in 1892 as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, and named after Lord Stanley of Preston. “Challenge” was the standard word for a trophy that could be won permanently.

Why the oldest ones are British

The concentration is real and it has a mundane explanation: record-keeping and civic property.

The Carlisle Bells survived because they became part of the city council’s collection of civic silver. That meant they were inventoried, stored and protected as municipal assets for four centuries — not left in the keeping of whichever owner won them, which is how most early prizes were lost, melted or sold.

Trophies survive when an institution outlives the winners. It is the same reason the Jules Rimet trophy vanished after being handed to a national federation, while its predecessor’s base sat safely forgotten in a FIFA basement.

What this page deliberately does not do

The America’s Cup carries two of those claims at once — oldest international competition, fourth oldest continuous trophy — and is governed by a deed rather than a federation. See the America’s Cup Deed of Gift.

The same ambiguity surrounds the trophy usually called North America’s oldest. There are actually three Stanley Cups, and the one players lift is not the one Lord Stanley bought — see the Stanley Cup.

It does not rank these by importance, prestige or beauty. The ordering is by date, which is a measurable fact, and the dates come from the awarding bodies.

Several trophies frequently listed as “among the oldest” were left out because their dates could not be traced to a named source. Reaching a round ten is not a good enough reason to include an unverified claim — a rule our research and sourcing policy applies to every page here.

More on where sporting institutions came from is in origins and history, and more trophies in trophies and competitions.