All that glitters is not gold at the Olympics
You know those Olympic gold medals?
If they were made of solid gold, they’d each cost $21,200.
And so they’re not. That doesn’t make them cheap, because they’re made of silver plus about 1.2% gold, and they’re worth $565, which is not chump change. The silver medals are (no surprise here) 100% silver, worth $315, so that tiny bit of gold in the gold medal adds an extra $250.
The bronze medals, on the other hand (made of 95% copper and the rest zinc) are like trinkets you win at the fair: worth $2.38 each. But they still has a lot of symbolic value to those who own them.
For example—India, one of the world’s most populous countries, would love to win a few more of those bronze medals. India would love to win a few more of any kind of Olympic medals:
India has managed just one gold medal since 1980, when shooter Abhinav Bindra became the first individual to win gold for his country at the 10 meter air rifle event in 2008. The country’s previous gold medals, eight between 1928-1980, were all in field hockey…
Granted, the 2016 Games are still on-going. So far, badminton star P.V. Sindhu has won the silver medal at the women’s singles competition on Friday. Thursday saw Sakshi Malik take bronze at the 58kg women’s wrestling category, India’s first medal at Rio.
The article offers some theories as to why India is so abysmal at Olympic sports. But it seems to come down to the idea that India isn’t interested in pushing those sports, and has very few programs to develop Olympic athletes. In other words, the cause seems cultural, but no one really knows why most of the world is pretty sports-mad and Indians seem content with cricket and field hockey.
And who knew—I certainly didn’t—that many countries pay their gold medal winners a financial bonus up-front?
The Olympics is no longer like the ideal of the Olympics. The original ideal was to have strictly amateur athletes. That went down the tubes because the Communist countries all fielded athletes who were essentially pros. Their job at home was being an athlete. Since the competition at that time was all about the Cold War between the free world and the Communist world, the Americans etal had to find a way to allow athletes to train as extensively as the Communist bloc athletes. Little by little the restrictions were eased and now we have millionaire basketball players and golfers competing. It is a grand pageant, but it is not about the glory of amateur sport any longer. As long as people keep watching I suppose the powers that be will want to keep on keepin on. I like some of it, but it’s just not the same as in my day.
I knew some of the skiers on our Winter Olympic teams back in the 50s and 60s. They were, for the most part, true amateurs who sacrificed economically to do the necessary training and travel. They delayed their careers to stick with skiing and try to make the most of the talent they had been given. Good, highly motivated folks who saw little or no financial reward from their hard work. But they had the memories, and for them, that counted a lot.
The Olympics were never important enough to me, to watch.
Those who seek the glory of the world, and those who seek the national attention brought by the seekers, seems useful for bringing pride to a nation. But human pride is a cheap and common thing, of little worth compared to virtues.
The more virtues exceptional individuals show, the more they overshadow the vices of the majority of humans. Rather than glorifying a race or a nation, the Olympics to me, merely showcases the extreme gap between the so called “equality” of democracies.
“…the cause seems cultural, but no one really knows why most of the world is pretty sports-mad and Indians seem content with cricket and field hockey.”
Instead of concentrating on the insignificant and irrelevant field of athletic endeavors, their culture wisely selects for those traits best able to contribute to their strategic, long term goal – world domination of convenience store ownership, according to noted cultural anthropologist U.J. Biden.
The bronze medals, on the other hand (made of 95% copper and the rest zinc) are like trinkets you win at the fair
Sounds like brass, but the really brown and ugly version people use.
Brass that can be cold worked, is 90% pure copper with the rest zinc. Zinc was not found in natural ores back in the day, so it was harder to make than bronze. By about a few thousand years, as far as human knowledge can see.
Brass with a high content of copper, actually looks like gold, very yellowish and bright.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Olympic+bronze+medals&FORM=HDRSC2
It looks like they are just using good old pure copper, almost, to make it look that reddish brown. Or perhaps the content of the metal is a different alloy mix.
I picked up a few points about metallurgy when researching which swords to buy that wouldn’t break on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass
I’m having a hard time believing Olympic medals are made out of so ductile a material as too much pure copper. That’s not exactly a good idea.
It would be a better idea to make them out of bronze. Copper + tin. In fact, from my net look up, that is what many are made out of. Although if they wanted a shinier golden looking bronze medal, they would use hot forged 50/50 brass.
Instead of concentrating on the insignificant and irrelevant field of athletic endeavors, their culture wisely selects for those traits best able to contribute to their strategic, long term goal — world domination of convenience store ownership, according to noted cultural anthropologist U.J. Biden.
India would probably dominate in the swordmanship swinging, combat arts, and hand to hand arts, based on their traditional training regimen.
It is because the Olympics are Greek focused, that many of the martial arts that India and Persia used, are not included.
Maybe if the Olympics were all about Greco Roman wrestling, the Indians would have a shot, but it’s recently been mostly martial sports. That conflicts with martial arts training, to a certain degree.
Btw, Brass has anti germ and viral properties. It’s actually pretty good of human civilization to be capable of reducing alloys like that, plus pure high carbon steel, to so cheap a price point that Normal EveryDay humans may afford of it. But, as expected, humans, especially high class journalists, look down on “cheap things”, even as they misunderstand the real value of the world.
NBC deserves a cow dung medal for their coverage. Ever time I tuned in they were showing people preparing to perform or interviews, or it seemed like it anyway in relation to showing actual sports.
Bangladesh, a country with around 150 million people, has never won an Olympic medal. The article in which I discovered this attributes this to their fanatical love of cricket, which is not an Olympic sport. Apparently all athletically talented Bangladeshis gravitate toward cricket.