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Why Olympians bite their medals?

By: Srishty Sharon
Date: 31 Aug, 2018
Image Courtesy: Badminton Photo

The sports aficionados are engrossed in the TV screens all day long especially during the screening of their favorite games. There’s no stopping! And Olympics has always been charting on every sports lover list. The unique tournament that occurs after every 4 years is indeed a sporty celebration across the world. What really amuses us is the uncanny habit of players biting the medals for a photograph. Well, you all remember this, don’t you? Let’s unravel the secret to this mystery!


The players usually bite their medals while posing for photographs. Many Olympic athletes along with Michael Phelps and Sakshi Malik were seen doing the same. Wonder what is the reason behind the queer tradition of biting of medals? Have you ever thought about it?


Well, it turns out that there is a very fascinating history behind this raging trend.


Since eons, there beholds a fascinating fact about the gold medals that will take you by surprise. The gold medals are not made up of pure solid gold. As quoted in the Indian Express, the Olympic gold medals have 494g of silver and just 6g of gold. Only during the Summer Olympics 2012, held at Stockholm, it was at Sweden, the last Olympic where the real gold medals were bestowed to the Olympians.


The winners bite their medals to check if they are engaged in a fair and square deal or not. Gold is a soft metal and biting on it can reveal about its purity. The bite marks will be left on the surface of a medal made up of pure gold. However, if the medal is not made of pure gold and instead it is gold plated, then the gold surface might lop off. This was the main reason behind the biting on medals.


Nowadays, the photographers want better pictures of the historic moments and so to give a good pose, the athletes post as if they are biting the medal. There are also many athletes who rather choose to kiss the medals, still, many of them choose to bite their medals. The Rio Olympics 2016 women’s singles winner Carolina Marin chose to bite on her medal.

So, the next time you notice an Olympic winner biting his or her medal, you know the secret behind such a cool antic.


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