How much are Olympic medals worth? and facts!

According t Wiki - The current GOLD medals are actually made of silver and coated with 1/5 of an ounce of gold worth about $83.00. The last solid gold medals were given away in Stockholm, Germany in 1912.

(Cheap-skates!!!!!!) After ALL they go through and they get a *fake* gold medal! sheesh.

Vancouver Sun:

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Cash-starved athletes everywhere were smiling in 2007 and not necessarily because they earned a medal in their respective events.

In what was arguably the biggest story of the year for amateur sports, the Canadian Olympic Committee, ideally looking to storm the medal table at the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010, in November announced its Athlete Excellence Fund, which turns a podium finish at the Olympics into bank notes - $20,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze.

Multiple medal winners will get multiple cash rewards from the COC starting with the Beijing Summer Games in 2008 and continuing through to Vancouver.

According to Blackwell:

Abstract:

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If the table of Olympic medals is ordered by total medals

won, it is dominated by the larger wealthier nations.

However, when ordered by medals per capita, small island

nations dominate, and the eastern bloc dominates when

ordering is on medals per gross domestic product. This

situation changes only somewhat when medal `points' are

considered (gold, 3, silver, 2, bronze, 1, for example).

This paper examines the least squares fitting of a log-linear

allometric model to data relating all these variables for

the 80 countries which won at least one bronze medal in

Sydney. This analysis suggests that Cuba `won' convincingly,

that the USA finished 18th and that gold and silver medals

are both valued about twice as much as bronze medals.

And - IMO - the medals are priceless with respect to endorsement cashola.