Olympic gold medals are mostly silver

Win the Olympics and you’ll stand on the top step clutching a gold medal that is, by weight, almost entirely silver. By rule, a modern Olympic gold must be at least 92.5 percent silver — the same purity as sterling — and then coated with just about 6 grams of pure gold. On a medal that can weigh 500 grams, that gilding is barely more than a wash of metal.

It wasn’t always this way. At the 1912 Stockholm Games, gold medals really were solid gold. After that, surging gold prices and the disruptions of war made all-gold medals impractical, and the International Olympic Committee settled on a gilded-silver standard that has held ever since.

The grandest symbol in sport is essentially a silver medal in a thin golden coat.

The 6-gram minimum is genuine gold, so the medal isn’t a fake — it’s an honest gold-plated object. But the value lives in the achievement, not the metal. Melted down, the precious-metal content of an Olympic gold is worth only a few hundred to roughly a thousand dollars, a tiny fraction of what champions are offered to part with one.

The last athletes to win medals of pure gold did so over a century ago — and no one since has stood on a podium holding what the name actually promises.