Olympic medal

• 1. Introduction

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  An Olympic medal is one of the most recognized objects in sport, yet almost everything about its physical form has changed since the first modern Games were held in Athens in 1896. The winners that year did not receive gold. They took home silver and an olive branch. The runners-up got copper or bronze and a laurel branch. What we think of as the gold-silver-bronze tradition only became standard eight years later, at the 1904 Games in St. Louis. And the design stamped on the front of every Summer Olympic medal from 1928 through 2000 quietly contained a factual error that the whole world missed for three-quarters of a century. What does it take to win one of these objects? Who decides what it looks like and what it is made of? And how did a piece of silver-plated metal come to carry the weight of everything we associate with Olympic glory?

• 2. From Olive Branch to Bronze

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  At the Ancient Olympic Games, the prize was an olive wreath cut from a wild olive tree growing at Olympia. According to the ancient writer Pausanias, Heracles introduced it as a tribute to Zeus, awarded to the winner of the running race. When the modern Games opened in Athens in 1896, medals replaced the wreath, but the gold-silver-bronze ranking we take for granted was not yet in place. Gold medals were not given out that year. First-place finishers received a silver medal. Second-place competitors got copper or bronze. The International Olympic Committee later retroactively assigned gold, silver, and bronze designations to the top three finishers from the 1896 and 1900 Games, imposing a tidy hierarchy on those early competitions after the fact. The 1900 Paris Games added another wrinkle: they stand as the only Summer Olympics ever to award rectangular medals. Gilt silver went to winners in shooting, lifesaving, automobile racing, and gymnastics. In many sports that year, medals were not given out at all; most of the prizes were cups and trophies. The clean sequence of gold for first, silver for second, and bronze for third across every event did not arrive until the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis.

• 3. The Cassioli Mistake

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  In 1923, the IOC launched a competition for sculptors to create a unified medal design for the Summer Games. The winner, chosen in 1928, was an Italian artist named Giuseppe Cassioli. His design, called Trionfo, placed Nike at the center of the obverse, holding a winner's crown and palm, with a large building drawn in the background. That building was the Roman Colosseum. Cassioli's design debuted at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam and remained the face of the Summer Olympic medal for decades. The reverse changed first: the 1972 Munich Games became the first to give the reverse a new look, with a design by Gerhard Marcks of the Bauhaus school featuring the mythological twins Castor and Pollux. But the Colosseum-fronted obverse persisted. The Greek press eventually noticed the problem. The Colosseum is a Roman amphitheater, not a Greek structure. The Olympics were born in Greece. The image on the front of every gold, silver, and bronze medal was honoring the wrong civilization. At the 2000 Sydney Games, designer Wojciech Pietranik originally substituted the Sydney Opera House for the Colosseum, but the IOC insisted the Colosseum remain. The Sydney Organising Committee kept the flawed design, citing cost and time constraints. The Colosseum finally disappeared after 76 years, replaced at the 2004 Athens Games by a design from Elena Votsi depicting the Panathenaic Stadium. That design remains on every Summer Olympic medal today.

• 4. What a Medal Is Made Of

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  The IOC sets firm physical rules for every medal. The minimum diameter is 60 millimeters. The minimum thickness is 3 millimeters. The sport must be written on the medal. What the public calls the "gold medal" is, by regulation, composed of at least 92.5 percent silver and then plated with 6 grams of gold. In 2010, the raw metal in a gold medal was worth roughly $494. By the time of the Tokyo Games in 2021, that figure had risen to around $800. The silver medal is also 92.5 percent silver; in 2010 its metal value was about $260, rising to $460 at Tokyo. The bronze medal is the humblest object by material: at the Tokyo Games it was 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc, with a metal value of roughly $5. The medals themselves have grown considerably over time. The 1896 Athens medals had a diameter of 48 millimeters and weighed 47 grams. By the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, the gold medal weighed 500 grams and measured 85 millimeters across. Gold medals from 1904 through 1912 were made of solid gold, a distinction that no longer applies. The 2024 Paris medals introduced something unprecedented: hexagonal tokens of iron taken from the original iron of the Eiffel Tower, embedded in the reverse of each medal alongside the Paris 2024 logo.

• 5. Winter's Freedom

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  While the Summer Games labored under the long shadow of Cassioli's Trionfo, the Winter Olympics were never bound by any single design. The first Winter Games in 1924 in Chamonix, France produced a medal that did not even carry the Olympic rings. Nike appeared on the 1932 and 1936 Winter medals but has shown up only once in the designs since. Snowflakes recur across multiple Games, and the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius appears on four Winter Games medals but on none of the Summer ones. The freedom also extended to materials and shapes. For three consecutive Winter Games, hosts embedded unconventional materials directly into their medals: glass at the 1992 Games in Albertville, sparagmite at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, and lacquer at the 1998 Games in Nagano. Summer Olympics hosts did not match this experimentation until Beijing 2008, which incorporated jade into the medal. Shapes have varied even more dramatically in winter. The 1972 Sapporo medals were square with rounded, wavy lines. The 1984 Sarajevo medals were circular but set inside a large rounded rectangular frame. The 2010 Vancouver medals had undulating edges, and each one was individually cropped from a larger First Nations artwork, so no two medals were identical. Winter medals also tend to be larger, thicker, and heavier than their Summer counterparts.

• 6. The Podium and the Prize

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  Before 1932, medal ceremonies looked nothing like they do today. Athletes received their medals at the closing ceremony wearing evening dress. The presenting official stood still while competitors filed past. The victory podium itself was not part of the Olympics until Henri de Baillet-Latour ordered its introduction in 1931, after seeing one used at the 1930 British Empire Games. The first Olympic podium appeared at the 1932 Winter Games. The arrangement has been consistent ever since: the gold medallist stands in the center at the highest elevation, with the silver winner to their right and the bronze winner to their left. The 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome were the first in which medals were hung around the athletes' necks rather than handed to them, suspended from a chain of laurel leaves. A colored ribbon replaced the chain in later years. When Athens hosted in 2004, athletes on the podium also received a traditional olive wreath crown. At the 2016 Rio Games, each medalist additionally received a wooden statuette of the Olympic logo. The 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games introduced the "medals plaza," a public venue where presentations were held in the evenings so spectators could attend events that would otherwise have taken place at remote, small, or high-altitude venues. The plaza also gave each evening a musical program, turning the ceremony into a public celebration that endures as a Winter Games feature. Beyond medals, every athlete placing first through eighth receives an Olympic diploma, and all competitors receive a participation medal.

• 7. Money Behind the Medals

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  The medal itself carries no cash value from the IOC, but many nations have built their own reward systems around it. At the 2024 Paris Games, 33 countries confirmed they would give financial prizes to their medalists. Of those, 15 were awarding cash bonuses exceeding $100,000 for a gold medal. The amounts vary by country and by the class of medal won. The Paris 2024 medals also introduced a design element with an explicit material story: the iron tokens from the Eiffel Tower embedded in the reverse were sourced from the original ironwork of the structure, giving each Paris medal a piece of the city's most famous landmark. The designer of the 2024 medals was the jewelry house Chaumet, with the medals minted by the Monnaie de Paris, the same institution that produced the medals for the very first modern Games in 1896.