Sochi Olympics – How much gold in a gold medal?

Have you ever heard the one about the Olympian who sold his Gold Medal? How about four of them? It seems surprising doesn’t it, that anyone who has won a medal at the Olympics would want to part with it, but some have tried. Surely though, if you are going through a rough patch, you can at least rely on a Gold medal to get you some cash quick, after all, they’re made of gold, right? Right?

Albemarle Bond explains that the answer is actually a little more complicated than you might think. Actually, most gold medals contain just 6 grams of gold, which is a legal requirement. The last 100% gold medal was awarded in 1912. Gold medals at the Olympics are actually quite a high percentage of silver, which means that whilst they are not the pure gold that we all perhaps wished for, they are still worth a lot of money, sometimes selling for thousands and millions in online auctions.

Here, for instance we can see how some medals are valued, and it’s interesting to note that medals won on ‘home turf’ so to speak, can wind up being worth more.

What about those mysterious Olympians who actually went ahead and sold their medals? How much did they get? Well, the truth is, it varies, massively. Tommie Smith, a runner who’s name you may not be complete familiar with tried and failed to sell his medal to fund a youth programme in his local neighbourhood. Smith is perhaps most famous for being one of the two Americans who performed the Black Power salute on the podium in 1968, yet he could not sell his medal.

More positive however is the story of Wladimir Klitschko who sold his gold medal in a charity auction to benefit his children’s sports camp foundation, Klitschko Brothers Foundation. The medal was sold for a whopping $1 million, and even more impressive, the backer who paid the enormous sum, returned the medal to Klitschko immediately afterwards. This is all the more inspiring when you consider that the gold medal awarded to Klitschko was one of the very first ever awarded to the Ukraine as an independent country.