The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games has taken a new approach to producing winners’ medals.
“Approximately 5,000 medals have been produced from small electronic devices that were contributed by people all over Japan…From the procurement of the medals to the development of their design, the entire country of Japan was involved in the production of the medals for the Tokyo 2020 Games – a project that was only possible with the participation of people across the nation.”
The current medal format – which awards gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top finishers in each event – was introduced during the 1904 Olympics. For a few years, around that time, the medals were made of gold, silver and bronze, but that’s no longer the case. The medals awarded at the Tokyo Games are composed of a variety of minerals:
- Olympic gold. The gold medal contains 550 grams of silver ($490) covered in 6 grams of gold plating ($380). That puts its monetary value at about $870.
- Olympic silver. The silver medal is made of pure silver. At the 2020 Olympics, the medal weighs in at about 550 grams, and its value is about $490.
- Olympic bronze. The bronze medal is comprised of 450 grams – almost a pound – of red brass. Red brass is 95 percent copper and 3 percent zinc, and is valued at about $2.40 a pound. The medal’s monetary value is about $2.40.
On the rare occasion when a medal is sold, its value strongly correlates with the visibility and marketability of the athlete who won it; medals attached to particular names or stories attract higher prices. Per the Guinness World Records, the most expensive Olympic medal ever sold was one of four gold medals won by Jesse Owens, the sprinter who dominated the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. In 2013, one of his golds sold at auction for around $1.46 million to Ron Burkle, owner of the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins. A gold medal from the 2004 Athens Games has a collector’s value of approximately $16,500; a silver from the 1972 Munich games is worth $6,000.
In 2021, two Olympic gold medals won by Cuban athletes Iván Pedroso and Leuris Pupo each fetched over $70,000 at auction. And while women gymnasts almost always make millions off their gold medals, athletes in less-popular sports need a unique or interesting story — like winning the 100-meter sprint and being declared the “fastest man or woman alive” — to increase their ultimate profit. An athlete who dominates the hammer-throw needs a really good back story to leverage their success into any significant value.
In 2018, Money reported that gold medals tend to sell for between $20,000 and $50,000 at auction. But each medal is valued individually, according to unique, circumstantial factors that extend beyond its actual precious mineral content. Simply having an Olympic medal in your garage doesn’t necessarily mean you have a goldmine; not every winner gets his or her face on the side of a Wheaties box. In fact, in some of the more obscure events, gold-winning athletes often fail to score any kind of endorsement. For example, winter medals tend to be worth less at auction than summer ones. And in the case of athletes — like Lance Armstrong — who are stripped of their win(s), the IOC requires that the related medals be returned to the Olympic Committee, not sold.
Ultimately, the real answer to the question about the value of Olympic medals is that they are priceless. The achievement they represent – becoming one of the world’s best athletes in a sport – has a value that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
