SHOCKING evidence in olympic medals.... all gold champions have been duped.?

At the modern Olympic Games, winners of a sporting discipline receive a gold medal in recognition of their achievement. At the Ancient Olympic Games only one winner per event was crowned with kotinos which was an olive wreath made of wild olive leaves from a sacred tree near the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Aristophanes in Plutus makes a sensible remark why victorious athletes are crowned with wreath made of wild olive instead of gold.Herodotus describes a story that explains why there were only a few Greek men at the Battle of Thermopylae since "all other men were participating in the Olympic Games" and that the prize for the winner was "an olive-wreath". When Tigranes, an Armenian general learned this, he uttered to his leader a most noble saying: "Good heavens! what kind of men are these against whom you have brought us to fight? Men who do not compete for possessions, but for honour". Hence medals were not awarded at the ancient Olympic Games.

At the 1896 Summer Olympics, however, winners received a silver medal and the second place finisher received a bronze medal. In 1900, most winners received cups or trophies instead of medals. The next three Olympics (1904, 1908, 1912) awarded the winners solid gold medals, but the medals themselves were smaller. The use of gold rapidly declined with the onset of the first World War, also with the second.

The last series of Olympic medals to be made of solid gold were awarded at the 1912 Olympic games in Sweden.

Olympic Gold medals are required to be made from at least 92.5% silver, and must contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold. All Olympic medals must be at least 60mm in diameter and 3mm thick.

The gold medals that will be awarded in London this year will be the biggest and heaviest handed out at any summer Olympics. At 400 grams (14 ounces) they will be 17 times heavier than at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. On the other hand, the 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold—6 grams is the minimum requirement. The London medal will have a gold content of only about 1.5%, and at current prices will be worth $706. Calculations by The Economist find that this is much more than the "podium value" of any previous gold medal (based on estimates of the composition of medals and bullion prices at the time, adjusted for inflation). This is partly because gold and silver prices are now historically high and partly because this year's medal is so much heavier, even though the extra weight is silver rather than gold. For the first time, the silver in this year's "gold" medal is actually worth more than its gold content. Moreover, if the metal content of earlier medals is valued at today's bullion prices, the London gold is worth only just over half of those handed out in 1912.

I think that the only " Shocking " thing to have come out of this whole farce is the degree to which the competitors all seem to cheat and to take drugs to help them win .

The medals are about as real as the competitions .

I actually visited the little town of Olympia once and stayed there a week , in the course of which I looked around the Museum of the Olympics there , and can remember my dissapointment in the quality and design of things like the medals and the torches in there - pretty crude things , and the medals like something you'd put on a dog's collar .

The whole thing is just a show , and is all about people making money from staging it .

Let us hope that afterwards the facilities are better used than all that was built in Greece for the Athens Olympics . I'm not holding my breath though .

The composition of the Olympic medals you quote is absolutely correct.

However, this has nothing at all to do with the London Olympics or its organisers..

It is a rule laid down by the International Olympics Committee and has been in place since 1912. So no solid gold medal has been awarded since then.

In other words, the medals at the summer Olympics in Beijing, Atlanta, Athens and Sydney were made of exactly the same balance of metals. I don't understand why no one has noticed before!

In all cases, the cost of designing and making the medals is borne by the host country. In addition to the medals given to winning athletes, each host country is obliged to make a further 75 medals (25 of each kind) as a presentation set for the IOC.

If the gold medals were solid gold, they would be worth nearly 17,085.60 EUR (£13,385) each. Since more than 2,100 medals are being given out at the Olympics this year, you can probably understand why the IOC's ruling was put in place.

If you would like to check the IOC rules for yourself, they are printed in the 'Protocol' manual. Here's the link: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/files/Technical_Man...

Go to p52 for the text in French; p53 for the text in English.

"Les médailles auront au minimum un diamètre de 60mm et une épaisseur de 3 mm. Les médailles pour le première et deuxième places seront en argent au titre minimum de 925-1000, la médaille pour la première place devant être dorée avec au moins 6 grammes d'or fin."

"The medals shall be at least 60mm in diameter and 3mm thick. The medals for first and second places shall be of silver of at least 925-100 grade; the medal for first place shall be gilded with at least 6g of pure gold."

Intriguing question. . . I have a difficult time voting in opposition to Lennox, in particular with Clay successful at lightheavy. Patterson gained at even decrease than that, I think, but Joe Frazier was once the primary heavyweight gold medalist to ever come to be world heavyweight champion. So in that recognize, i might ought to say that it in most cases comes down to Joe Frazier in opposition to Lennox Lewis. In the event that they have been to combat ten occasions, I believe Lewis would win 7 of them. Lewis's attain and measurement would commonly confuse the game Frazier, whose killer left hook wouldn't discover a residence as by and large as he'd like. I love Lewis in this one. . . . However the three times that Frazier will get to him, he makes Rahman seem like Mr. Rogers.

The medals composition is the least of the problems that surfaced in the UK Olympics.

Many organizing problems that were allowed to escape to the press show that their efforts were very cheaply programmed and/or badly executed.

An 11 year old takes the airplane and arrives in Rome where he is finally is detected and stopped.

Where was security??

The Olympic flame has had several different positions and certainly was not visible to the common view as it was customary.

The keys to Wimbledon were "misplaced" and had to be replaced with an extra 50.000 pounds cost.

Athletes were not monitored while making their attempts and had to do extra attempts to cover their efforts.

Those and many other problems are the side effects of their "perfect organization". If those were done by any other country their newspapers would have still be pointing them out.

They end up tonight and most likely we will see another "grand" closing ceremony like the one made for the opening.

I suppose replicas of English pubs full of stupidly drunken youngsters can be a characteristic part of English lifestyle.

Think about how many gold metals are given throughout the Olympics. They would have to supply a LOT of gold to accompany those metals, and gold is very expensive.

Gold is so soft it always has to be mixed with another metal. No such thing as pure, 24%, gold. It would start changing shape in your hands.