How Much Is an Olympic Gold Medal Worth?

If the International Olympic Committee still gave solid gold medals to first place finishers, medals would be pretty     1     (value). But after the 1912 Games, they made the switch to silver medals coated in gold.

The gold medals for the Tokyo Olympics,     2     (create) by the Japanese designer Junichi Kawanishi, consist of about 6 grams of gold atop about 550 grams of pure silver.     3     gold and silver rates, like stock prices, fluctuate(波动) pretty     4     (frequent), the value of the medal isn’t exactly static(不变的). But in general, it’s hovering(徘徊) somewhere above $800. A silver medal, which     5     (make) up of 550 grams of pure silver, comes in at $462; and bronze medals, mostly copper and a little zinc, are worth just a few bucks.

But Olympic gold medals have value beyond the sum of their parts, and plenty of     6     (athlete) have hocked(典当) them for much more than $800 or so. Mark Wells,     7     member of the “Miracle on Ice” US hockey team of 1980,     8     (sell) his to a private collector,     9     auctioned (拍卖) it off for nearly $311,000 in 2010. Wells’s teammate, Mark Pavelich, made $262,900 off his own medal four years later.

Others end up in the auction circuit long after the original     10     (own) are gone. In 2013, for example, one of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics sold for about $1.47 million.