One gram of gold, used to make 7,000 medals. Less than a week after it went around her neck, the edges had already turned black.
On the day Chinese karate athlete Li Qiaoqiao won her gold medal, she felt the back was a little rough to the touch, but thought nothing of it. After she returned home, relatives took turns looking at it. The scratches got worse by the day, and the edges started to discolor. In the end, she found some clear protective film and wrapped the medal in it—the same way you’d put a screen protector on a new phone.
On September 25, an esports athlete said the color around the edge of his medal looked wrong. That night, the organizing committee sent someone to his hotel and replaced it with a new one. They didn’t even wait until the next day. Their public statement said it was the only case among the 7,000 medals.
That claim held up for exactly six days. On October 1, they changed their story: they’d received four requests to replace medals, had processed one, and were reviewing the other three. Then South Korea’s first-ever skateboarding gold medalist, Kang Jun-i, posted a photo of her medal, and the South Korean delegation went straight to the Olympic Council of Asia to request replacements in bulk.
And yet the specifications on the official website are perfectly clear: 80 millimeters in diameter, 5 millimeters thick, weighing 265 grams, with a silver base and at least one gram of gold plating. The Olympic standard is six grams.
That’s five grams less gold. At a spot price of over $4,100 per ounce, the material savings on one medal amount to less than 5,000 yuan. What can that money buy? Nothing. It’s not enough to matter.
A lot of people’s first reaction is that Japanese manufacturing is no good. But it’s not just that. The Mint is indeed responsible, but this isn’t just one organization’s problem. At the Paris Olympics two years ago, a batch of medals oxidized and turned black after the Games, and their plating started to peel. The Paris Mint admitted fault and replaced them for free. One contributing factor was that the EU had restricted chromium trioxide coatings, which are resistant to wear, that year. Environmental standards took precedence over durability standards, and the whole industry is paying for that trade-off. Everyone is happy to write “green and environmentally friendly” in a press release; nobody wants to add one more line to the quality-control checklist for wear testing, because that line costs money. This Nagoya medal simply has gold plating at the bare minimum. Five years ago, at the Tokyo Olympics, Zhu Xueying’s gold medal lost its coating with a scrape of her fingernail. Five years have passed, and the craftsmanship hasn’t moved forward at all. Whether the plating is too thin or the recycled metal contains too many impurities, nobody can say for sure.
A medal, at its core, is proof. Those few grams of metal aren’t worth much; what gives them value is that people recognize them. How can proof fall apart? In three ways: the physical object wears away, the verifier refuses to accept it, or the standard is quietly lowered. None of these problems can be escaped, even on-chain.
At the last two Olympic Games, digital commemorative badges began to be issued. Save one on your phone: no paint to chip, no oxidation. Sounds convenient. It isn’t. They depend on the partner’s app staying online and its servers keeping running. The moment the app shuts down, your badge is gone. It doesn’t even get the chance to turn black.
I’ve been thinking about another layer to this. The problem with physical proof is wear and tear: touch it once and it loses a layer; after ten years, all that’s left is an outline. The problem with digital proof is custody: you can’t touch it at all, but it can disappear in an instant, leaving not even an outline to prove it ever existed. You can at least save the former with a protective film; there’s nowhere to stick one on the latter. Sure, you save on materials—but every bit of that saving is ultimately paid for in trust. Not a cent less.
If you still have a few old commemorative medals at home, dig them out and check the edges. That blackened ring is the cost they saved back then. Touch it and you’ll know.
Of the 7,000 medals, how many had problems? Guess how many figures the organizing committee gave us. None. That’s the number they should be making public, even more than how many grams of gold they plated onto each medal.
$CHZ $BTC $ETH
#亚运会 #名古屋 #奖牌 #Digital collectibles
On the day Chinese karate athlete Li Qiaoqiao won her gold medal, she felt the back was a little rough to the touch, but thought nothing of it. After she returned home, relatives took turns looking at it. The scratches got worse by the day, and the edges started to discolor. In the end, she found some clear protective film and wrapped the medal in it—the same way you’d put a screen protector on a new phone.
On September 25, an esports athlete said the color around the edge of his medal looked wrong. That night, the organizing committee sent someone to his hotel and replaced it with a new one. They didn’t even wait until the next day. Their public statement said it was the only case among the 7,000 medals.
That claim held up for exactly six days. On October 1, they changed their story: they’d received four requests to replace medals, had processed one, and were reviewing the other three. Then South Korea’s first-ever skateboarding gold medalist, Kang Jun-i, posted a photo of her medal, and the South Korean delegation went straight to the Olympic Council of Asia to request replacements in bulk.
And yet the specifications on the official website are perfectly clear: 80 millimeters in diameter, 5 millimeters thick, weighing 265 grams, with a silver base and at least one gram of gold plating. The Olympic standard is six grams.
That’s five grams less gold. At a spot price of over $4,100 per ounce, the material savings on one medal amount to less than 5,000 yuan. What can that money buy? Nothing. It’s not enough to matter.
A lot of people’s first reaction is that Japanese manufacturing is no good. But it’s not just that. The Mint is indeed responsible, but this isn’t just one organization’s problem. At the Paris Olympics two years ago, a batch of medals oxidized and turned black after the Games, and their plating started to peel. The Paris Mint admitted fault and replaced them for free. One contributing factor was that the EU had restricted chromium trioxide coatings, which are resistant to wear, that year. Environmental standards took precedence over durability standards, and the whole industry is paying for that trade-off. Everyone is happy to write “green and environmentally friendly” in a press release; nobody wants to add one more line to the quality-control checklist for wear testing, because that line costs money. This Nagoya medal simply has gold plating at the bare minimum. Five years ago, at the Tokyo Olympics, Zhu Xueying’s gold medal lost its coating with a scrape of her fingernail. Five years have passed, and the craftsmanship hasn’t moved forward at all. Whether the plating is too thin or the recycled metal contains too many impurities, nobody can say for sure.
A medal, at its core, is proof. Those few grams of metal aren’t worth much; what gives them value is that people recognize them. How can proof fall apart? In three ways: the physical object wears away, the verifier refuses to accept it, or the standard is quietly lowered. None of these problems can be escaped, even on-chain.
At the last two Olympic Games, digital commemorative badges began to be issued. Save one on your phone: no paint to chip, no oxidation. Sounds convenient. It isn’t. They depend on the partner’s app staying online and its servers keeping running. The moment the app shuts down, your badge is gone. It doesn’t even get the chance to turn black.
I’ve been thinking about another layer to this. The problem with physical proof is wear and tear: touch it once and it loses a layer; after ten years, all that’s left is an outline. The problem with digital proof is custody: you can’t touch it at all, but it can disappear in an instant, leaving not even an outline to prove it ever existed. You can at least save the former with a protective film; there’s nowhere to stick one on the latter. Sure, you save on materials—but every bit of that saving is ultimately paid for in trust. Not a cent less.
If you still have a few old commemorative medals at home, dig them out and check the edges. That blackened ring is the cost they saved back then. Touch it and you’ll know.
Of the 7,000 medals, how many had problems? Guess how many figures the organizing committee gave us. None. That’s the number they should be making public, even more than how many grams of gold they plated onto each medal.
$CHZ $BTC $ETH
#亚运会 #名古屋 #奖牌 #Digital collectibles