For sports fans around the world, it’s a familiar image, one that’s etched into memories across the globe every four years.
An athlete at the Olympics stands atop the podium with a medal draped around their neck and their face beaming with pride as their country’s national anthem plays over the venue’s loudspeakers. It’s often in that moment when the accomplishment becomes real, when a lifelong dream has been realized, the years of tireless work have been rewarded and an athlete can definitively say that they’re the best in the world at what they do.
Sometimes, there’s another act that’s a part of that ritual.
It’s common for athletes from the United States or elsewhere to grip on to their medal and bring it to their mouth before gently biting on it, creating a shot that’s frequently immortalized in celebratory pictures that are used to commemorate gold-medal-winning athletes in the years and decades after their feats.
For those who have never seen it before, and even for some who have, it’s likely confusing (and, for dentists, worrisome.) Why do athletes bite on their medals? How did it get started?
Here’s what you need to know about why athletes bite their medals as the 2024 Paris Olympics wind down:
Why do Olympic athletes bite their medals?
There are a few explanations as to why athletes at the Olympics bite their medals, some of which are more relevant now than they were, say, a century ago.
Historically, biting gold was a way to test the metal’s authenticity. If a trader bit into a piece of gold like a coin and their gnawing left some kind of visible dent in the soft metal, then it was real. If not, it was likely some other kind of metal being fraudulently passed off as gold.
Olympic champions, however, don’t have that concern. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) stopped awarding pure gold medals in 1912. Today, gold medals are mostly the metal famously associated with second place, silver, as the IOC requires that gold and silver medals be at least 92.5% pure silver. To offer at least some visual evidence of its namesake, gold medals contain six grams of gold.
We just want to officially confirm that the #Tokyo2020 medals are not edible!
Our 🥇🥈🥉 medals are made from material recycled from electronic devices donated by the Japanese public.
So, you don't have to bite them… but we know you still will 😛 #UnitedByEmotion
— #Tokyo2020 (@Tokyo2020) July 25, 2021
So if athletes aren’t double-checking the metallurgic integrity of their hard-earned prize, why do they go through the effort of biting into their medals? Mostly, it’s for the sake of appearances.
Modern Olympians bite into medals primarily to satisfy the requests of photographers capturing their post-event celebration.
“It’s become an obsession with the photographers,” David Wallechinsky, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians and co-author of “The Complete Book of the Olympics,” said to CNN in 2012. “I think they look at it as an iconic shot, as something that you can probably sell. I don’t think it’s something the athletes would probably do on their own.”
The phenomenon isn’t limited to the Olympics. Tennis star Rafael Nadal became famous for biting into the Coupe des Mousquetaires, the trophy given to the French Open men’s singles champion. It’s something he did quite often, too, winning the famed tournament at Roland Garros 14 times over his illustrious career.
It’s a staged shot that can occasionally backfire, though.
At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, German luger David Möller broke his tooth while biting into a silver medal he had just been awarded.
“The photographers wanted a picture of me holding the medal just with my teeth,” Möller told the German newspaper Bild. “Later at dinner, I noticed a bit of one of my teeth was missing.”
2024 Paris Olympics medal count
What country has seen its athletes biting into medals the most during the 2024 Paris Olympics?
Here’s a look at the medal count heading into the final day of competition:
- United States: 122
- China: 90
- Great Britain: 63
- France: 62
- Australia: 50
- Japan: 43
- Italy: 39
- Netherlands: 32
- Germany: 31
- Republic of Korea: 30