OLYMPICS OLYMPICS OLYMPICS OLYMPICS. Everybody's talking about it. Or maybe I'm just talking
about it a lot lately, but what about those medals guys? Are they real gold or what?
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Hey guys, Trace here for DNews! Have you ever seen photos of people biting their olympic
medal? As if placing a piece of metal in your mouth after finally achieving sports success
wasn't weird enough; there's actually a lot more you're not seeing.
Firstly, the actual BITE is an old practice of collectors, testing the softness of gold
by biting it. The Mohs hardness scale measures how HARD a mineral is. Enamel on your
teeth, for example, scores a5... but PURE gold scores only a 2.5, so your tooth would
be able to scratch or dent pure gold. Silver is around 2.7, so you should be able
to scratch that too, but the point is -- CHECK OUT HOW PURE THIS SHIZ!
The thing is, Olympic medals are a pretty new tradition. The ancient Greeks placed a
wreath of olive branches on the head of the winner.
When the Olympics were revived in 1896, the winners of the first Athens Olympics all received
silver medals, not because they were cheap, precisely the opposite.
Silver was MORE precious than gold at the time. First place got silver and second got
copper. During the 1900 Paris Olympics the medals
were rectangular, and in St. Louis in 1904 the first gold medals were awarded! It wasn't
until London's 1908 medals that gold was awarded for first, silver second, and bronze for third
place. The thing is... the last actual SOLID GOLD medal was awarded in 1912 in Stockholm.
The dirty secret of the Olympics is gold medals aren't really gold. Well, they are. Six grams
of gold. Six. That's like three pennies.
The weight of the medals varies from one Olympics to another, as does the size... the International
Olympic Committee requires -- for fairness I guess? -- Gold and silver medals be made
of 92.5% silver, plated with at least 6 grams of gold. Yep. You heard me right.
The gold medals are almost all silver, the bit that's not gold or silver is copper. Which
means, factoring in the six grams of gold,
the medals currently stand at 1.45-percent gold, and 6-percent copper.
The SILVER medals replaced the gold with... surprise... more silver.
Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper with a touch of zinc added in. The reason the cities
don't use gold anymore is it's frickin' expensive! The cities have to BUY the metal to make these
things.
For the London Olympic games in 2012, the medals weighed 412 grams -- for comparison,
a can of coke weighs 373 grams.
The new Sochi medals will be between 460 and 531 grams depending. So... they might have
as little as 1.13-percent gold.
Salt Lake City's medals were tiny and light, whereas London's were heavy. But regardless,
they are ALL ceremonial, they're not going to balance your budget with the precious ingredients.
If London's were allllll Gold the medals alone would have cost 40-million dollars.
If you sold the gold medal for scrap, you'd get about 708 buckazoids, but by contrast...
the Bronze medal is worth less than five. dollars. Yay, third place is still good!
To satisfy the curious, medals DO come up for auction once in a while. A gold medal
from one of the members of the
"Miracle on Ice" team at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics went for over $310,000 four years
ago.
Long story short, it's not about their monetary worth - it's about the glory.
Many of the athletes spend years of training and blood and sweat to have that thing slung
around their neck. Does it bug you that the medals aren't what
you think they are? Should we go back to olive branches? Tell us what you think below the
video and thanks for watching, and happy Olympics to you!