How much is an Olympic gold medal worth? Inside the Tokyo 2020 medal's metal and melt value

When an athlete bites the gold, the obvious question follows: how much is an Olympic gold medal worth? The honest answer splits in two. As a lump of metal it is worth surprisingly little — a few hundred dollars. As a piece of history it can be worth more than a house.

Start with the metal, because that number is fixed and verifiable. A Tokyo 2020 gold medal is not solid gold. It weighs about 556 grams and is, by mass, almost entirely silver: roughly 550 grams of silver carrying about 6 grams of gold plated over the surface. That gold layer is about 1.1% of the medal. The name is a coating.

Put that composition against the market and the Olympic medal melt value becomes concrete. At precious-metal prices in late July 2021, CNBC's markets team valued the 6 grams of gold at about US$353 and the 550 grams of silver at about US$466 — a total metal, or melt, value near US$820. So the direct answer to how much is an Olympic gold medal worth, purely as raw material, is roughly the price of a mid-range smartphone.

What are Olympic medals made of?

The question of what are Olympic medals made of has a rules-based answer. The International Olympic Committee sets minimum standards: a first-place medal must be at least 92.5% silver (the sterling-silver benchmark) and must carry a minimum of 6 grams of pure gold. Solid-gold Olympic medals have not been awarded since the 1912 Stockholm Games. Everything since is silver with a gold face.

The Tokyo 2020 medals followed the standard closely. The gold medal weighed about 556 grams; the silver medal about 550 grams of pure silver; and the bronze about 450 grams of red brass — roughly 95% copper and 5% zinc. All three measured 85 millimetres across. Knowing that the "gold" is really silver is the key to the whole Olympic gold medal value puzzle.

Olympic medal melt value: doing the maths

The Olympic medal melt value is simply the market price of the metals inside. For the Tokyo 2020 gold that means pricing about 6 grams of gold and 550 grams of silver. Using late-July 2021 spot prices, that came to roughly US$353 of gold plus US$466 of silver — the US$820 figure above. The silver medal, being 550 grams of pure silver with no gold, was worth about US$466 in metal, and the bronze only a few dollars: brass is cheap.

Because the medal is mostly silver, its value tracks the silver price far more than the gold price. In quieter markets an Olympic gold medal value has sat closer to US$500; the Tokyo number was higher because both metals were expensive in 2021. The Olympic gold medal value moves with the commodity markets, not with the sporting result.

Only about 1.1% of a "gold" medal is gold. By mass it is a silver medal with a thin gold face — which is why its metal value is measured in hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.

614 or 339? How many golds are really handed out

The headline count deserves a footnote. Tokyo 2020 ran 339 gold-medal events, so there were 339 distinct gold titles to win. Once team events are broken down to the athletes actually on the field of play, the number of individual competitors eligible for a gold rises to about 614 — one way of counting how many gold medals leave the podium. The official total across all three colours was 1,080 medals (339 gold, 339 silver and 402 bronze, since combat sports such as boxing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling award two bronzes). Either way, each of those golds carries the same modest metal value.

Collector value: where the real money is

The metal is a floor, not a ceiling. What decides how much is an Olympic gold medal worth on the open market is provenance — whose neck it hung around and what they did to earn it. The record belongs to one of the four gold medals sprinter Jesse Owens won at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which sold for US$1,466,574 in 2013. Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko sold his 1996 Atlanta gold for about US$1 million in 2012, donating the proceeds to charity. Those prices are thousands of times the melt value — the story, not the silver, is the asset.

For most athletes the medal is never for sale at any price, so its collector value is theoretical. But the contrast frames the whole topic: as raw material an Olympic gold medal value is a few hundred dollars; as a relic of a defining moment it is close to priceless.

How the Tokyo medals were made

Tokyo 2020 added a twist that makes the metal question more interesting. Every medal was struck from recycled metal recovered from used consumer electronics through the Tokyo 2020 Medal Project, a nationwide collection drive. Organisers reported extracting about 32 kilograms of gold, 3,500 kilograms of silver and 2,200 kilograms of bronze from donated phones and devices — enough for the roughly 5,000 medals produced for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was the first time an Olympics sourced 100% of its medal metal from recycled devices.

For more numbers on the moving world, see the full TravelStatsMan statistics index, browse the data desk homepage, or read a very different price tag in US$2 trillion of planes in our skies.

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