At the XXX Summer Olympic Games that ended in London, the best athletes of the planet were awarded 302 times with medals of the highest standard. However, although the medals for the first place are called gold, in fact, there is not much of this noble metal in them. But the value of these sporting trophies is, of course, not measured by the value of the metal they are made of.
The medals of the London Olympics are 85 mm in diameter and 7 mm thick, and the weight of awards of various denominations ranges from 375 to 400 grams. The medals for the first and second places are 92.5% silver. Medals for the second place to the required weight are supplemented with copper, and in the highest awards gold is added to copper - the coating of this metal is 1.34% of the total weight, or approximately 6 grams. In bronze awards 97% copper, 2.5% zinc and 0.5% tin. It is curious that the metals used to make the medals were mined near the American Salt Lake City and at the Mongolian Oyu Tolgoi deposit, zinc was brought from Australia, and tin from the British county of Cornwell.
In the history of the modern Olympic Games, the highest awards were made of pure gold only once - at the IV Sports Forum, which was also held in London in 1908. Then the medal had a diameter of only 3.3 cm, but it contained as much as 25 grams of the noble metal. The British were not obliged to do this - at the First Olympic Congress, held in 1894 in Paris, the Olympic Charter was adopted, which also set general standards for awards to athletes. It said that the medals for the first place should be made of 925 sterling silver and covered with 6 grams of gold. However, then these rules were rarely observed - for example, at the II Olympiad, which was held in the same place where the charter was adopted, the winners were awarded rectangular bronze medals with a silver coating. At all games held after the Second World War, the adopted standard is observed more precisely - the gold content in medals ranges from 6 to 6.5 grams.
If the price of a medal is measured by its constituent metals, the London 2012 gold medal should be valued at $ 644, the silver at $ 330, and the bronze at $ 5. However, there is a precedent when a Polish athlete put up a medal received in Athens for auction and received almost $ 82,500 for it.
