The athletes who take the podium at the Winter Olympics in Italy this month will receive the most expensive medals in Olympic history, thanks to a surge in global precious metals prices.
More than 700 gold, silver, and bronze medals will be awarded at the Games to the world’s top athletes in winter sports, including skiing, hockey, figure skating, and curling.
While the symbolic value of Olympic medals is impossible to measure, their monetary value is now at record levels. Since the Paris Summer Olympics in July 2024, spot prices for gold have risen by about 107% and for silver by almost 200%, according to FactSet. As a result, if we consider the value of the metals alone, gold medals are now valued at about $2,300, more than double their value during the Paris Olympics. Silver medals for second place are worth almost $1,400, more than three times what they were two years ago.
The rise in silver’s value is partly due to strong demand from private investors. Gold prices have risen after major central banks increased their reserves and investors began to actively invest in the traditional “safe haven” amid global political instability.
The medals for the Winter Olympics are made from recycled metal by the Italian State Mint and the Institute of Printing. However, despite their name, gold medals are almost entirely made of non-gold.
In a gold medal, only 6 grams of its 506 grams (16 troy ounces) is pure gold; the rest is silver. Bronze medals are made of copper. At 420 grams (15 ounces), they are worth about $5.60 each, according to the competition organizers. (A troy ounce is about 10% heavier than a regular ounce.)
According to Baldwin’s, an auction house in London, Olympic gold medals have not been made of pure gold since the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Those medals weighed just 26 grams (0.8 troy ounces) and would have been worth less than $20 at gold prices at the time. Adjusted for inflation in the United States, that amount would be about $530 today.
At the same time, the collectible value of Olympic medals can significantly exceed their metal value, said Dominic Czorny, head of the antique coin department at Baldwin’s auction house.