Individuals have been feeling disillusioned after discovering the reality about the gold medal.
Aside from perhaps a Nobel Prize, an Olympic gold medal is one of the most instantly recognizable and prestigious awards a person can win.
Gold is the natural choice for first place, given its status as a precious metal.
Recently, the news and social media have been flooded with images of jubilant athletes proudly wearing the revered award around their necks.
Numerous pictures also show them biting down on the gold medals for photo opportunities.
This practice originates from an old-fashioned method of testing the purity of a gold coin.
Since gold is a malleable metal, biting it could leave a tooth mark on the surface, indicating its purity. If no mark was left, it wasn’t pure gold.
However, if you were to bite down on an Olympic gold medal, you might be in for a surprise.
That’s because Olympic gold medals are not actually made of pure gold.
In reality, they consist of around 500 grams of pure silver along with 6 grams of gold.
Many people were taken aback, with one individual expressing their disbelief on Instagram: “So basically you get a silver medal even if you win a gold medal. That’s effed up man.”
Another person commented: “If the gold medal is made up of that much silver…imagine the silver medal.”
However, there is a logical reason behind the composition of gold medals being mostly silver.
If you were to purchase 500 grams of silver in the UK, it would cost you approximately $615, based on prices from bullionbypost.co.uk.
While this is still a significant amount, it pales in comparison to the cost of gold.
Purchasing 500 grams of gold would set you back around $39,537.
This really underscores the term ‘precious’ in precious metals.
Given that there are 329 medal events, which means 329 gold medals to be awarded, the cost of pure gold medals would be staggering.
Based on current prices, that would amount to approximately $13,007,673 worth of gold to be used for the medals.
Besides the astronomical cost, it misses the point to focus on the material value of the medal, as one person noted.
They wrote: “Winning one is priceless though. You’re immortalized as the best in the world.”
Precisely! And what could be more valuable to an athlete than that?