Obviously in terms of achievement, an Olympic gold medal is priceless, but in pure monetary terms the medals are probably worth less than you think.
The practice of giving out solid gold medals was abandoned at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden and was replaced by the current system of using a silver and copper alloy with a small amount of gold in comparison.
The medal is made of 494 grams of silver and 6 grams of gold.
The people over at NBC did the maths and worked out that the gold medal is actually worth £456 at today’s market prices.
That’s a long way short of the £16,500+ that would have to be shelved out for each Olympic gold medal if they were still using the same medals as pre-1912.
However, while this is the value purely in monetary terms for the raw product, it’s the winner that make the medal valuable, as people pay premium prices to get their hands on a piece of history.
Olympic gold medal winner Wladimir Klitschko sold his boxing gold medal from the 1996 Olympics for $1m in 2012 and donated the proceeds to a charity he set up in Ukraine to help impoverished children.
We can imagine the medal haul of Michael Phelps attracting a tidy sum of money.
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