Have you ever wondered how much the 2012 London Olympic Games medals are actually worth? With this year’s Olympic Games featuring the largest medals ever awarded in an Olympic ceremony, twice the size of those awarded in Bejing, BackstageOL breaks down the raw value of one of sport’s biggest prize.
After 11 days of competition, the United States and China have been battling it out for the top seat on the 2012 London Olympic Games medal count with over 60 medals each. Each medal, being the largest ever produced for an Olympic Games, weight in at a whopping 412 grams, or for you non-metric type, about the weight of a can of green beans.
Since the The Olympics Games have not handed out solid gold medals since the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games, the Olympics’ top prize is made up of only 1% of actual gold. So what is the gold medal actually made of? 92.5% of silver and 6.16% of copper, making the Olympics’ top prize only worth $644 in raw materials.
The silver medal is actually made of, you guessed it, silver. The second place medal is made up of 93% silver and 7% copper, thus bringing the raw value of the medal to around $330. Surprisingly, the bronze medal is worth a lot less than imagined. The mostly copper medal has a raw material value of less that $5.
This doesn’t mean that these medals are worthless though. A gold medal won by Mark Wells of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Hockey team sold for $310,700 at auction two years ago.
Although sales of Olympic Medals are rare, they are out there. Expect to pay anywhere from as low as $36 to $300,000 to own a piece of Olympic history.
