What do you think of this fact?
You know the photo: an Olympic champion on the podium, biting her gold medal. Except she’s mostly biting silver. An Olympic gold medal is at least 92.5 percent silver and only plated with at least 6 grams of pure gold.
Gold outside, silver inside
The rules come from the International Olympic Committee. The core of a gold medal is sterling silver, covered with a layer of real gold. Silver medals are also at least 92.5 percent silver. And bronze, according to the Las Vegas Sun, is mostly copper with a bit of zinc.
At the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina, a gold medal weighed 506 grams. Its pure metal value was around 2,300 US dollars, according to the report, and most of that came from the silver, not the gold.
Solid gold was a short phase
Solid gold medals were last handed out at the 1912 Games in Stockholm. After that, they were gone. Gold is expensive, heavy and pretty soft. A big medal made of pure gold would cost tens of thousands of dollars in raw material alone.
The start of the modern Games was even stranger. In 1896 in Athens, winners didn’t get a gold medal at all. They got silver. Second place got bronze, and third place got nothing. The gold, silver, bronze order we know today only arrived in 1904, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
A silver winner’s medal from 1896 sold at auction for about 112,000 US dollars.
What a medal is really worth
In the end, the metal value hardly matters. Historic medals sell for many times that amount at auction, because they carry a story, not just a few grams of precious metal.
So at the Olympics, gold is more of a wrapper. What’s inside is silver, and the real value is the win.