As i was closely monitoring the medal tally of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, it came out to my mind this silly question "How much the gold medal worth?"
So, i did some research about its weight, composition/purity and diameter.
Medal Specifications
Diameter: 85mm
Thickness
Thinnest part: 7.7mm
Thickest part: 12.1mm
Weight
Gold: about 556g
Silver: about 550g
Bronze: about 450g
Composition
Gold: more than 6 grams of gold plating on pure silver
Silver: pure silver
Bronze: red brass (95% copper and 5% zinc)
Source: Olympic.com
And to my surprise GOLD Medal is not pure gold at all, its 550g of pure silver plated with 6grams of gold.
We all know that for athlete and it's country representing, every medal is priceless but just to satisfy my curiousity, i made some computation how much its worth with its current price and composition.
As of this writting, the silver price is at $0.82 per gram.
550g x $0.82 = $451 for its silver content.
Now lets add the plating gold value of 6grams.
current spot price is at 58.32 per gram so,
6grams × 58.32 = $349.92
$451.00 silver value
$349.92 gold value
= $800.92
Just to have an idea of how much silver coins it takes to make a single olympic medal, i grab some silver coins amounting to 550g and 2 (facsimile) gold coin at 3 grams each.
It took me 25 silver coins of different type, size and purity content to get the exact weight of 550 grams plus 2 small gold coins (reproduction) at 3grams each for the 6 grams of gold content.
