The Olympic Games are nearly 3,000 years old. The gold, silver, and bronze medals awarded, only 120 years. NPR digs into the tradition that feels as long as time, finding it can be traced to an American city. Olympic medals themselves hail from the first occurrence of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. (The very first Olympic champions received wreath crowns in addition to fame and glory.) But champions in the 1896 Games received silver medals, second-place finishers received copper medals, and third-place finishers got, well, nothing. Four years later in Paris, winners were given prizes ranging from trophies to paintings.
But in 1904 in St. Louis, the tradition of awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top three finishers began. Ever since, athletes have been battling for a piece of gold to hang around their necks. But the medals haven't been solid gold since 1912. Modern gold medals are actually silver plated with at least 0.2 ounces of pure gold. The International Olympic Committee requires both gold and silver medals to be made with a minimum of 92.5% pure silver, per the Deseret News. Bronze medals aren't bronze at all, but contain 95% copper and 5% zinc, per the Washington Examiner. The gold medal is valued at $1,027, the silver at $535, and bronze at $4.60, according to Oxford Economics.
Of course, the medals awarded at each Olympic Games are unique. "There is a wonderful tradition of giving the host city a lot of liberty and opportunity to design a medal that very much speaks to the city's culture," Marisa Wigglesworth, CEO of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, tells NPR. The medals awarded in Tokyo in 2020 "contained recycled materials from electronic devices donated by the Japanese public," per the outlet. And this year in Paris, each medal contains a polished, hexagonal original piece of iron taken from the iconic Eiffel Tower—something not considered in the value estimate. (More Olympics stories.)
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