How much is an Olympic medal worth? How for whom.
For an athlete who wins it by competing - the value is priceless. For collectors, the value may not be priceless, but it is great. Seen in the classic technical sense - medals have a very precise value. Just as the quantities of gold, silver and precious metals used to make it have a precise value.
In the case of Paris 2024, there is one X factor - bits of the Eiffel Tower embedded in each of the 5.084 medals that will be handed out at the upcoming Olympics. Which means that in the case of the OI in France, the real value of the medals, perhaps, cannot be precisely determined.
Each medal, however, must respect certain characteristics - a diameter of 85 millimeters, a thickness of 9,2 and 18 grams of iron removed from the Eiffel Tower. The weight, however, differs depending on the material, i.e. the podium - the gold medal weighs 529 grams, the silver 525 and the bronze 455.
Many wonder how it is possible to incorporate a fragment of iron from the greatest landmark of Paris for each of the more than 5.000 medals. Simple - the Eiffel Tower, built between 1887 and 1889, has undergone numerous reconstructions over time. Some parts were removed, but not thrown away, or melted down - they were all burned, and the company that manages the huge tower gave the green light to use some of the original parts.
The polished iron fragment has a hexagonal shape, which represents France, since the French often call their country L'Hexagone - because of its shape. The reverse shows the Eiffel Tower from a bottom-up perspective.
When it comes to the history of gold medals at the Olympic Games, there have been various anomalies. Some gold medals, actually - and they weren't gold.
Only at the Olympic Games in 1904 in St. Louis, 1908 in London and 1912 in Stockholm were the most brilliant medals produced entirely from pure gold. Throughout history, the organizers have reduced the amount of gold and thereby significantly cut costs, so that the International Olympic Committee recently had to introduce some kind of norm - at least six grams of pure gold. The remaining 529 grams is silver (in a gold medal) with a minimum purity of 92,5 percent.
For the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the organizer hired the famous Japanese designer Junichi Kawanishi to make the medals, and the amounts of precious metals were more or less the same. So, if you resold them by melting the metal, you would only get 700 euros in the case of a gold medal. If the medal were made entirely of pure gold, the price would rise to a monstrous 30 thousand euros. A silver medal would be worth a little more than 400 euros if melted down, and a bronze medal only seven euros, because the ingredients of copper and zinc (or tin), from which it is produced, have a negligible value on the market. It is clear, however, that this is only a subjective fact: many athletes would throw themselves into the fire for a "seven euro" silver medal.
Dl.M.
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