People were angry to find out the truth about the gold medals, though it might rather miss the point of the Olympics
People have been left disillusioned after finding out the truth about the gold medal.
Short of maybe a Nobel Prize, an Olympic gold medal is perhaps one of the most instantly recognised and prestigious awards you can win.
Gold is the natural choice for first place, given gold’s status as a precious metal.
The last few days have seen the news and social media awash with pictures of beaming athletes flushed with pride as they wear the hallowed award around their neck.
There are almost as many pictures of them biting down on the gold medals for photo ops.
This comes from a crude old fashioned way of testing the purity of a gold coin.
As gold is a malleable metal, biting down on it could leave a tooth mark in the surface of the metal, and if it didn’t that meant it wasn’t pure gold.
An olympic gold medal. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
But if you were to emulate an Olympian and bite down on a gold medal, you might be in for a surprise.
That’s because Olympic gold medals are not actually pure gold.
In fact, they are made up of around 500g of pure silver with 6 grams of gold.
People were not impressed, with one person taking to Instagram to share their disbelief: “So basically you get a silver medal even if you win a gold medal. That’s effed up man.”
Meanwhile another one wrote: “If the gold medal is made up of that much silver…imagine the silver medal.”
But let’s just take a moment here, as there is one very good reason that the majority of a gold medal is in fact silver.
If you wanted to buy 500g of silver, in the UK this would cost you the equivalent of around $615, according to prices on bullionbypost.co.uk.
It’s quite pricey, but it’s absolutely nothing compared to gold.
It’s not about the medal, it’s about the prestige and sportsmanship. (Elsa/Getty Images)
If you wanted to buy 500g of gold you would pay the equivalent of around $39,537.
So, really putting the ‘precious’ in precious metals.
Given that there are 329 medal events that means there are 329 gold medals to be awarded.
If these were pure gold, based on those prices, which were current at the time of writing, that’s approximately $13,007,673 worth of gold to be forged into medals.
Aside from the cost, you could say that it rather misses the point to think about the value of the medal, as one person pointed out.
They wrote: “Winning one is priceless though. You’re immortalized as the best in the world.”
Exactly! And what could be more valuable to an athlete than that?
