Gold medal’s worth may surprise you

Q: How much is one of those huge Olympic gold medals worth? And, while you’re at it, why do they invariably picture the winning athletes biting them?

A: Swimmer Michael Phelps may be the most decorated athlete in Olympics history, but if you melted down his 28 medals (23 gold, three silver and two bronze) he couldn’t buy himself a new Ford Fiesta, much less a Porsche or Jaguar.

Surprised? After all, they are huge and look expensive. In fact, at 500 grams (17.6 ounces) and 85 millimeters (3.3 inches) across, they’re reportedly the heaviest medals in Summer Olympics history and are tied for the largest. If Phelps dangled all 28 of his medals around his neck, he’d have 30 pounds weighing him down.

But intrinsic value? Well, not so much. As you may know from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” all that glitters is not gold and that’s true again in this case. While these gold medals, made by the Mint of Brazil, look shiny and worthy of storage at Fort Knox, they’re actually not. In fact, out of the 500 grams of metal, only 6 are 24-karat gold, which is used to plate the medal. The other 494 are sterling silver. (Silver medals contain 500 grams of sterling silver and are valued at about $320. Bronze are 475 grams of copper and 25 grams of zinc and are worth very little.)

So, at Monday morning prices of $43.21 for a gram of gold and 64 cents for a gram of silver, one of Phelps’ gold medals is worth about $260 in gold and another $300 in silver for a not-so-grand total of about $560. If you’d put all of Phelps’ medals together, you’d come up with only about $14,500, give or take.

Of course, to do otherwise would further break the bank of the host countries. If all the stadia, security, etc., etc., weren’t enough expense, just one 500-gram medal of pure gold would run you somewhere around $21,600. Because the Mint of Brazil made 812 for this year’s games, you’d have a bill of more than $17.5 million. Add in the 812 silver and 864 bronze, and you’re looking at a sweet $18 million. (Of course, that would be a bargain compared to the nearly $24 million they would have spent in 2012 when gold prices were averaging $1,675 an ounce.)

Apparently, the Olympics people learned the lesson of doing more with less almost from the start. At the very first summer games in 1896, winners were awarded silver medals while runners-up took the bronze. Four years later, most champions reportedly were given trophies or cups instead of medals. Only in 1904 in St. Louis did they start going for broke by awarding medals of pure gold in the 94 events. It didn’t last long. After the 1912 games in Stockholm, Sweden, gold medals became the now-familiar gold-silver-copper mix.

Moneywise, then, even the gold medals are like the tip that waiters or hairdressers receive. In the United States, the U.S. Olympics Committee awards each of its athletes $25,000 for a gold medal, $15,000 for a silver and $10,000 for a bronze, which means that over the years Phelps has received $640,000 through these prizes alone. And some individual sports federations like USA Swimming sweeten the pot. (Of course, he could have done much better had be been born in Singapore. According to Bloomberg Businessweek in 2012, gold medal winners there are given $800,000 for each gold. Don’t worry, they won’t break the bank. Last Friday, Joseph Schooling beat Phelps to become Singapore’s first gold medal winner ever.

And there’s no telling what Phelps might get for his medals if he put them up for auction as is, because there is a small but fanatical group of people who collect medals of famous Olympians. Ukranian boxer Wladmir Klitschko reportedly sold his 1994 medal for $1 million in 2012. Some say each of Phelps’ medals might net him $100,000 — or even more if it was from a particularly memorable event.

Sadly, Mark Wells, a center on 1980’s unforgettable USA Miracle on Ice hockey team, was forced to sell his gold medal for $40,000 to cover medical expenses for a rare genetic disease that affects his spinal cord and leaves him bed-ridden for extended periods. A few years later, the medal was auctioned off for $310,700.

I would guess, however, there is no amount of money that would make most winners part with these treasures. Even I still have the brass medals I won for my saxophone solos in grade school music contests.

As for why we constantly see the trite pose of Olympians biting their medals, it may be a throwback to the California Gold Rush days of the 1850s. Legend has it, miners would use their teeth to test whether what they had found was gold or pyrite (fool’s gold). According to the Mohs Hardness scale, tooth enamel is harder than gold but softer than pyrite. So biting would leave a scratch in real gold but might leave you with a chipped tooth if you bit too hard on pyrite. The method also allowed people to tell whether coins were all gold or simply gold-plated with something baser and harder underneath.

It is supposed, then, that many years ago an Olympian in his or her excitement re-enacted this pioneering tradition to make sure they weren’t dreaming on the winner’s podium. Now, according to four-time medalist and TV sports analyst Summer Sanders, photographers insist on the pose because it’s so much more interesting than a medal shown worn around a neck or even held up next to one’s face.

Maybe they should make the athletes pose with chocolate medallions wrapped in gold foil to make them tastier.

Today’s trivia

How will visually impaired athletes competing in the Paralympics (Sept. 7-18 in Rio) know whether they have a gold, silver or bronze medal?

Answer to Sunday’s trivia: As a young boy, Edwin Perkins was fascinated by chemistry and inventing things. After settling in Hastings, Neb., in 1920, he began producing a line of 125 “Onor-Maid” items — mostly patent medicines and household goods — and selling them door to door and by mail. Perhaps his most popular item was Fruit Smack, a fruit-flavored liquid concentrate. But shipping this through the mail was awkward and ate into his profits so, by 1927, he turned it into a powdered soft-drink mix that promised 10 glasses for 10 cents. In 1931, he moved his Perkins Products Co. to Chicago to focus on Fruit Smack. Three years later, he changed the name of his popular drink to what we know it today: Kool-Aid, which is Nebraska’s official soft drink.

This story was originally published August 16, 2016 at 10:30 AM with the headline "Gold medal’s worth may surprise you."