“Olympic Medals Miss The Gold Standard”

1912 Olympic Gold Medal courtesy of AmericanHeritage1.com

Originally posted on Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

Olympic gold medals are silver with just a patina of gold. The last solid gold gold medal was awarded in 1912.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette notes in a story entitled “Olympic medals miss gold standard”:

The coveted first prize medals are actually made of silver and plated with a micro-thin layer of gold to distinguish them from the silver and bronze awards.

This year’s gold medals are the largest and heaviest ever produced — 4 inches in diameter, 0.4 inches thick and weighing 1 pound each. If they were solid gold, each one would be worth about $21,500 at today’s prices. Since they actually contain only 6 grams of gold layered on top of 525 grams of silver, they’re worth about $550.

The last time athletes in Olympic games received solid gold medals was at the 1912 summer games in Stockholm, Sweden, more than a century ago, according to the website Resource Investor.

The 1912 date is notable.  It closely preceded the outbreak of the Great War, World War I.  The gold standard was an early casualty.   And the century of nearly unbroken war of the 20th Century, including World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, served as a headwind to full resumption.   The world, in that time, was able intermittently to do no better than the fatally adulterated version called the “gold-exchange” standard.  That was better than the fiduciary paper standard which now haunts the world yet far inferior to the real thing.

The world rapidly approaches the centenary of the events that led to the outbreak of the Great War.  The 100 years of guerre a outrance — “war without limit” — begins to recede.  With the end of an epoch of war the gold standard revives as a policy option.

How superior the classical gold standard proved in comparison with its alternatives. And a more diminutive Olympic medal made of fine gold would present with far greater integrity than does four inches of silver plated with a veneer of gold.  Time to restore gold.