Why do Olympic athletes bite their medals?

For sports fans around the world, it is a familiar image, one that is etched into memories across the globe every four years.

An athlete at the Olympics stands atop the podium with a medal around their neck and their face beaming with pride as their country’s national anthem plays over the venue’s loudspeakers. 

It is 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 are the best in the world at what they do.

Sometimes, there’s another act that’s a part of that ritual. It’s a common sight at gold medal ceremonies – but where does the tradition come from?

It’s a practice as common and ingrained in the Olympics as some of the sports themselves – but why do they do it?

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?

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.

Back in the day, one of the ways to determine whether the shiny metal in your hand was gold was to bite into it, as gold is softer and more malleable than other metals. Basically, if you took a bite into it and you could see your teeth mark, there’s a good chance it was authentic and actually gold.

That’s largely irrelevant these days, especially in the context of the Olympics, but the tradition has endured. Of course, the gold medals awarded at the Olympics aren’t actually solid gold – it’s more of a compound of around 90 per cent silver, and at least six grams of the valuable stuff. Every medal in Paris contains a tiny piece of the Eiffel Tower, which is made of wrought-iron.

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.

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.”

credit: USA Today