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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

The Olympics is really my favorite sporting event. Although, I think I have a problem with that silver medal. Because when you think about it, you win the gold - you feel good, you win the bronze - you think, "Well, at least I got something". But when you win that silver it's like, "Congratulations, you almost won. Of all the losers you came in first of that group. You're the number one loser. No one lost ahead of you!"

- Jerry Seinfeld

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Well, there's a silver lining (pun intended), which is that the silver medal is made out of pure silver and is therefore worth much more than the bronze medal.

The gold medal is made of solid silver that is plated by a small amount (4oz, IIRC) of gold. EDIT: 6 grams, not 4oz, as pointed out below.

This is one of the things I find most annoying about the Olympics. Oh you spend billions on useless frivolous things. And then the literal gold medal is fake.

Unless they made the medals much smaller, that would be incredibly expensive. They give out thousands of medals, after all. Someone smarter than me can calculate the cost based on the size of the medals and the density of gold.

Also, athletes would probably feel more pressure to sell their medals if they were solid gold. That would enrich them, which is good, but there's something to be said for the medals remaining in the hands of the athletes.

Edit: this is wrong, see the comment below, I misunderstood an article that said "339 medals will be awarded". It's 339 events will be contested, and of course team events have multiple medals.

Well, not really thousands of medals - in this year's summer games there will be 339 medals awarded, so 113 gold medals.

Tokyo gold medals weigh 556g, so if they were solid gold (their weight would differ a bit but be in the same ball park) each gold medal would be worth nearly $33,000 just in metal costs, which would work out to a total of $3,694,286 for all the gold medals.

I think you miscalculated. 339 sets of medals will be given for a total of 5000. Also, the Paralympic Games add some more medals.

So the actual number will be north of 10 million it seems.

So, around 0.1% of the cost of putting on the games?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tokyo-olympics-staggering-p...

The extra security around all this gold would probably end up costing more than the medals themselves.

> their weight would differ a bit but be in the same ball park

Apparently gold is nearly twice as dense as silver: https://www.edrsilver.com/English/ceo-corner/ceo-corner-deta...

Gold is also nearly twice as dense as lead (which is around 11g/cm^3, slightly more than silver.)

I once calculated it and came to the conclusion it was easily doable for the medals to be pure gold.

Let's take the Rio 2016 medal as a reference. It has 494g of silver and 6g of gold. For a cost of $564 [1]. There were 307 gold medals awarded[2]. This comes to a total of 173148$ for the medals.

Let's take the worst possible conversion. i.e. you want a solid gold medal with the same volume as the original. Silver has a density of 10,49g per cubic centimeter and gold has a density of 19.32g per cubic centimeter. So to get the same volume we need 910g of gold to replace the silver. Price of gold per gram in 2016 was about 40$. So this 910g of gold would cost 36400$. For a total gold medal price of 53,329,584$. Let's ignore the silver you no longer need since it's not that significant.

For reference the entirety of the rio olympics cost 13.2 billion[3]. Having solid gold medals would be about 0.4% additional cost. Yes it's a lot of money but it doesn't seem unrealistic to me at all.

[1] https://somethingborrowedpdx.com/how-much-does-a-olympic-gol...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab....

[3] https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1051553/cost-of-rio-...

> There were 307 gold medals awarded

Does that account for team sports, or Paralympics?

It doesn't include team sport and the paralympics. But I wouldn't include the paralympics anyway, just like I wouldn't include the youth olympics. Team sport actually does have to be counted. But I don't think it changes the conclusion. By far the most olympic sports are solo.

Even if only 10% of olympic sports were team sports - but those teams were things like basketball/soccer/volleyball that have 15+ players per team - that would mean the majority of medals given out are to people who were on a team.

Teams are hardly as large as 15+. Of course the athletes that don't compete are not given medals. Even if you more then double the amount I calculated let's say 1%. That's still a reasonable price pool.

it's not the cost that matters, its the uselessness and hugely increased security risk.

Then why not just make them out of steel, or aluminum, or--hell--plastic?

Clearly, the composition of the medal has symbolic value beyond "usefulness". Also, I expect an Olympic medal is worth at least a little more than any ol' hunk of the same constituent materials. So it's not like they are without risk as is.

If you know Rio, then a less valuable gold medal seems to be a good thing.

The additional cost might be a small percentage of the budget but what does it buy you? If you can't justify it, it will get cut. All the other frivolous things have pointy haired managers advocating for them.

This happens a lot for any sport considered fun or prestigious. For example the prize money from competitive programming in the 2000s was actually pretty decent (topcoder paid out 100k total). Then they realized the top people will still show up even if there's no prize.

Oh I definitely understand. I just think it's ridiculous. The event is about the olympians. Spending a fraction of a percent of the budget of the event on the price seems fair.

Oh boy, if I am the best in the whole world at my discipline, and my performance has been broadcasted to everybody, and there's billions here and there made because of it. For sure I want my damn medal to be pure gold.

What are examples of frivolous things ?

For example the one time use of all the buildings.

It doesn't matter if the gold metal is fake. Assuming you can prove it's real, a gold coated hunk of silver that was a real medal in the Olympics has to be worth more than an equivalent amount (weight or volume) of gold. The same reason no one is concerned about the intrinsic value of dollars.

There was, if I recall, an example of two Olympians melting down their medals because of some totalitarian government (Jews in 1940's Germany?) The medals were later recast. Only example I know of of the base value being worth more.

Meanwhile, it helps athletes. Because you have to pay income tax on the base metal value, not the assumed collector value. Although the US may have exempted medals from income taxes??

I think you're thinking of how Niels Bohr dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia for two of his Jewish colleagues when the Nazis invaded Denmark. After the war the gold solution was returned to the Swedish Academy and the medals were recast.

Thank you. That's what I was thinking of.

In the US, the prize money and value of the medals is exempted from income for athletes earning less than $1M.

https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17740769/obama-ends...

4oz would be a large amount of gold, over $7000 worth.

From an article I read:

This year's medals are made from material recycled from electronic devices donated by the people of Japan. However, Olympic gold medals are required to be made from at least 92.5% silver, and must contain a minimum of six grams of gold. The Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medals contain more than six grams of gold plating on pure silver. Silver medals are pure silver while bronze medals are red brass (95% copper and 5% zinc). The Olympic gold medals at Tokyo 2020 weigh roughly 556g, with silver weighing 550g and bronze 450g.

That's why I think there should be two silver medals, immediately given to the winner of two semi-finals.

If you think about any sport with a one-on-one final, the silver medal is for the loser of that final. But the same team/athlete won a semi-final and were probably excited when they did. So just hand them the medal at that point.

Things are a tad more complicated for tournaments with 3+n finalists. But I have the feeling that being the second-fastest out of ten sprinters is not a bad thing.

If they introduced a 4th place medal, would the bronze medalists feel worse?

Remember the McKayla Maroney "not impressed" meme? Silver medal.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to other people.

... said no one who ever competed professionally in anything.

Simone Biles only competes with herself.

Are you implying she doesn't go for gold?

If that was her goal she could sandbag, but she doesn't.

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