Is an Olympic gold medal really made of gold? The gold medal the winners at the Olympics get is only 7.5% gold. It is 92.5% silver with only a gold-plating of about 6g.
With 6g of gold in a medal, the value of the medal would be about $800 if sold for its precious metals. Although to be fair, if the medal was made of solid gold, it would be worth about $31,000. There were 812 gold medals handed out at the Tokyo Olympics, which would have come to $24,500,000. That’s a little too expensive for any Olympic committee to afford.
Winning a gold medal is a great achievement, but there were no medals given at the original Olympic Games. Winners were given an olive branch. The Olympic Games started in about 1200 B.C. in Olympia, Greece. The games were held every four years and contestants came from all over the Greek Empire to take part. The games ran until 393 A.D. when the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, who was a Christian, banned them because he thought the Olympic Games were a pagan festival. There were no games for 1,500 years. Then, in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, people became fascinated with ancient Greek culture. In 1892, a French baron, Pierre de Coubertin, had the idea of reviving the Olympics. It took him a few years to convince people, but, when he did, the IOC was formed and the first Olympic Games of modern times were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896.
In this first Olympic Games, winners were given olive branches and silver medals, in line with what they thought the Greeks had done. In the 1900 Paris Olympics, winners were given cups, trophies, or works of art. It was up to each host nation to decide what awards to present.
The gold, silver, and bronze system we have now was started in the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. There are three possible reasons why they choose these three metals.
Reason 1: The different metals correspond to different ages of main in Greek mythology. The Golden Age was when men lived among the gods. The Silver Ager was where youth lasted a hundred years. And the Bronze Age was the era of heroes.
Reason 2: All three of these metals are in the same column in the periodic table and they don’t break down. That means they are found in their purest form.
Reason 3: They are all valuable because of their rarity, with gold being the rarest and bronze the least rare.
In 1904, the gold medal was made of pure gold. There were 97 gold medals handed out in total. The 1908 Olympics was held in London and the gold medals were solid gold again. There were 110 gold medals awarded. The 1912 Olympics was in Stockholm and the gold medals were still made of gold. 103 gold medals were awarded. And Stockholm was the last time gold medals were made of solid gold. The next Olympics was in Belgium in 1920. World War 1 had come along in the meantime and countries were still feeling the damage of war. Gold was not in plentiful supply. On top of that, there were 155 gold medals awarded in 1920. The host countries and the IOC realized that they couldn’t afford to keep handing out solid gold medals, so the amount of gold dropped.
How would you feel if you won a gold, silver, or bronze medal? Interestingly, studies by psychologists have found that people who receive a bronze medal are far happier than people who win a silver one. It all comes down to who we compare ourselves to. Bronze medalists compare themselves to the person who came fourth and see how lucky they were to win any medal. On the other hand, silver medalists compare themselves to the person who got gold. They get stuck in a “what if” loop because they missed out on a gold medal. “What if I had done this differently…?” Etc. Bronze is seen as a positive because it is better than no medal while silver is seen as a negative because it is is not as good as gold. I don’t think I will ever have to worry about this, though.
So, Olympic medals have not been made of solid gold since 1912. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.as.com/en/2021/07/23/olympic_games/1627028063_790955.html
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a39011500/are-olympic-medals-real-gold/
https://sports.yahoo.com/olympic-medals-real-gold-exactly-212240754.html
https://www.nbcsports.com/northwest/tokyo-olympics/history-olympic-medals-explained-what-know-tokyo
https://supply.co/blogs/journal/when-did-gold-silver-and-bronze-become-the-pinnacle-achievement
https://globalquiz.org/en/question/when-and-where-was-the-idea-of-gold-silver-and/