Gold is one of the world’s most valuable stones, and in sports, it is given to top-performing athletes, in particular those who win the first prize in the competition.
You may have seen athletes from various sports disciplines being awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals at the end of the competition and could be wondering why they bite them when posing for pictures.
The winners receive gold medals, the runners-up receive silver medals, and the third-place finishers receive bronze.
The awarding of gold medals to elite athletes started at the Olympic Games.
According to Parade, the Olympic Games as we know them first debuted in 1896. However, at the first games, rather than gold, first-place competitors won silver medals, and second-place competitors won bronze.
In the next Olympics in 1900, the winners mostly received trophies or cups. It wasn’t until the 1904 Olympics that medals made of solid gold were awarded to top athletes.
However, the tradition of awarding pure gold medals to athletes was last honored at the 1912 Stockholm Summer Olympics, as it became more scarce when World War I began.
Since then, alloys have been used to lower the amount of gold in the medals, and as a result, they must now only contain 6 grams of gold, which means that the majority of the medals today are made of silver and a trace amount of copper.
BUT WHY DO ATHLETES STILL BITE GOLD MEDALS
The Parade further revealed that, many years ago, testing the validity of metal—any metal, not just Olympic medals—involved chewing it. People would bite on gold during the California gold rush in the late 1800s to see if it was genuine.
According to this belief, pure gold is a pliable, soft metal, and a bite was most likely real if it left indentation marks on the metal. If it wasn’t, your tooth might break.
However, the bite test these days has no use because the medals given are not made of pure gold.
Today’s athletes are merely continuing the custom of biting their medals, although, for many, this practice has no significance.
