Olympic Medals: The Real Gold, Silver & Bronze Medal Count
Friday, 7/26/2024 11:30
As Paris 2024 begins, here's the Olympics' real gold, silver and bronze medal count at current prices...
The PARIS OLYMPICS opening ceremony is just hours away, and as we wait to see how our home nations fare in summer 2024, we began thinking about the value of the medals awarded to first, second and third place winners.
It’s no surprise that the USA, of all the nations competing in the modern games, has won the greatest number of Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals – a staggering 2,637 medals to date from the summer Olympics.
That's more than a 1,000 more than the second-placed USSR and Russia combined.
But what is America's pile of gold, silver and bronze medals worth in monetary value? Our updated infographic looks at the bullion value of each nation's summer Olympics medals.
You can't simply count the total, find their weight, and multiply by the current live price however.
Paris's 2024 medals, for instance are the same 8.5cm in diameter as the recent Tokyo, Rio and London medals. But unlike some of their predecessors, each medal in Paris is a uniform 9.2mm thick.
More significant, the 2024 gold, silver and bronze Paris medals each contain 18 grams of iron from the Eiffel Tower. Excluding that near-valueless additional weight, if the French Games' gold medal was made of pure gold, it would weigh almost 1 kilogram and at current prices would be worth almost £60,000 ($77,000 or €71,000).
But instead, the
Chaumet designed 529-gram mix of silver (95.5%), wrought iron (3.4%) and a little gold (1.1%, some 6 grams) would set you back £1,183 ($1,528 or €1408) in the wholesale metal markets right now.
Indeed, when it comes to gold medals, only two of the 30 summer sporting events since the ancient Greek games were revived have given each winner a prize of that most precious metal.
The first modern games, held in Athens in 1896, didn't give gold at all to first place, but awarded a silver medal instead (plus an olive wreath), with second-place runners up receiving a copper-based bronze medallion.
The next games, Paris 1900, set the trend for gilding silver with gold to award as first prize. Only the next two games, St.Louis 1904 and London 1908, awarded a true gold medal to Olympic winners.
Since then, Olympic gold medals have in fact been mostly silver – gilded with a layer of gold – while silver medals also typically contain a small quantity of copper to help harden them, too. And while the metallic composition has changed a little across the years,
the size and shape of Olympic medals has varied widely.
Typically round, medals at Paris 1900 were instead rectangular, and Stockholm 1912 prizes were oval. The thinnest medals were awarded in Stockholm in 1956 (where
just the equestrian events took place, while the other games were hosted on the other side of the world in Melbourne), measuring only 2.5 millimetres in depth. The fattest were awarded in Barcelona in 1992, with a depth of almost 1 centimetre.
In 1908 London awarded the smallest diameter medal so far at only 3.5cm. The UK's tight-fistedness of 116 years ago is understandable, as London 1908 was one of only two modern Olympics to award a genuine gold medal to first-place winners. Weighing 72 grams (2.3 Troy ounces) its metal content would be worth £4,336 at July 2024 prices ($5,605 or €5,164).
Tokyo 2020's (held in 2021) super-sized medals made them the
heaviest-ever summer Olympic medals. Designed by Junichi Kawanishi, they gave first-place winners 556 grams of gilt silver!
There aren't any reliable, comprehensive data available for the exact metallic composition of more than a handful of the different medals designed, cast and awarded at the 30 games held since the modern Olympics began 128 years ago.
So in BullionVault's sortable table below, for each medal haul outside those two solid-gold years of 1904 and 1908, we've applied the composition used for the gold, silver and bronze medals awarded at London 2012.
That means:
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Gold medals are 1.34% gold, 92.5% silver, and 6.16% copper;
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Silver medals are 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper;
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Bronze medals are 97% copper, 2.5% zinc and 0.5% tin.
Being far more silver than gold means that overall, the total value of medals awarded in the modern games is still worth a whopping £4,441,940 ($5,739,425 or €5,290,019) at current metal prices. Using the same calculations, the United States has a total medal haul worth $1,307,417 (£1,011,751 or €1,204,823).
Take a look at our sortable table below to see how much your nation has earned on the podium!
Summer Olympics gold, silver and bronze facts 2024:
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No Bronze medals were awarded at the Athens games in 1896;
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USA has the most gold, silver and bronze medals with a total of 2,637 medals;
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Great Britain has the third most gold medals with 286 behind USA and USSR;
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China has the highest proportion of gold medals with 42%, amoungst countries with 20 or more medals;
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Kosovo with only 3 gold medals has the highest percentage of gold medals of all countries with 100%;
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15 countries have only ever won silver medals, Namibia's 5 medals have all been silver;
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11 countries have only ever won bronze, Kuwait leads this pack 3 in total;
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Germany (if you combine all their country iterations) with 1,384 medals would have the second most medals behind USA.
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