They work and train all hours of the day, striving to become the best in the world at what they do and it’s all worth it once that medal is around your neck. Sentimentally, it’s absolutely priceless.
But what if we just treated it for what a gold medal really was? A hunk of metal. How much would this be worth? Well, not as much as you think. It appears we’ve been lied to all this time and a gold medal isn’t entirely gold.
The practice of awarding all-gold medals to winners was abandoned after the Olympics in Stockholm back in 1912, which makes sense considering it would require more than £16,000 ($21,000) worth of metal by today’s current gold market.Nowadays, gold medals are almost entirely made of a silver and copper alloy and are only 1 per cent gold. NBC did the math and based on scrap value for gold and silver, the 494 grams of silver and six grams of gold only comes in at £454 ($587).
This means even if the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps, sold his entire collection of 23 gold medals, he’d only net a measly £10,000 ($13,000) in return.
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Don’t know about you but I’d definitely rather have them sitting on the mantelpiece at home than flogging one for the value of a flat-screen TV.
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