Precious Medals: What are they worth?

Frank Mariani

Frank Mariani is seasoned (but young-at-heart) artist with over 40 years of experience in the visual arts. Like many of his colleagues, his roots go wayyyy back to childhood where his creativity revealed itself not just in art class, but in the margins and odd free spaces of notebooks, much to the chagrin (and sometimes scolding) of his teachers. When the muse strikes, the hand draws!

Frank Mariani

I was curious. Exactly what metals go into the Olympic medals? How much actual gold and silver are in the top two medal categories? What about poor bronze? It’s merely an alloy of copper, zinc and tin! How can it hang with the aforementioned big shots?

Everyone knows that gold and silver are considered precious metals. There are eight metals that are considered precious. They are gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium. That list goes from “know it well” to “know something about it” to “who made up this bogus name?” I should shut up now because readers with real metallurgical expertise are going to shoot me down with words that are more damaging than real metal bullets.

Here are some facts I scrounged up online. The Paris 2024 Olympic organizing committee says the gold and silver medals for the Games are made from solid silver, and that six grams of gold are used in the first-place medals. The gold is gilded on top.

So what are they worth? The medals themselves are not really worth all that much in actual materials. Gold medals have not been made with pure gold since 1912. The Paris Olympics gold medals are actually 95.4% silver according to People. That makes their value around $950. Silver medals are worth about $486 and bronze medals (Poor bronze!) just $13 in actual metal worth.

Pie charts showing the compositions of the medals given out at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games

Compositions of the medals of the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris © Arche Energy Pty Ltd

One pretty cool thing about all of this year’s medals is that they contain original iron that was used in the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

Paris 2024 Olympic medals to feature ... — See that hexagonal piece in the middle? It’s a piece of iron taken from Eiffel Tower renovation scraps.

This is all minutiae compared to what people really want to know, and that is WHAT ARE THE MEDAL COUNTS FOR EACH COUNTRY? The two front runners are the USA and China. The black and white fella here is gaining on the red, white and blue for overall count, but is unlikely to overtake Uncle Sam in 2024. However, there’s a decent chance that China can take the gold for the most gold medals.