They’re irregularly shaped, made of metal, coated in gold, silver or bronze and weigh about 1 1/4-pounds. Each medal is hand-finished meaning that no two Olympic medals are the same. On each medal is a torch-holding athlete rising in flames through an ice-encrusted mountain, an image reflecting the 2002 Winter Games’ theme “Light the Fire Within” which are written in tiny etched letters. The back of each medal will feature a close-up of Nike, Goddess of Victory, and a depiction of the sport in which the medal was won. They are the medals that will be awarded at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.
The Salt Lake medals depict 16 sports, a difference from standard Olympic design. The Olympic rings are shown more prominently than usual.
The 2002 medals were to be unveiled officially Monday at O.C. Tanner, the Utah-based company whose pledge of financial support for the Games in early 1999 helped break SLOC out of a fund-raising quagmire that had been muddied by the Olympic bribery scandal.
O.C. Tanner is making medals for 477 top Olympic athletes and hundreds more for Paralympians, tie-winners and Olympic archives. It took about 20 hours of painstaking labour for the company to make each medal. The company donated all the minerals and handiwork.
The gold medals come with six grams of gold plating. The silver medals are solid silver, and the bronze is an alloy of 90 per cent copper and 10 per cent zinc over a silver base. Each medal comes in its own walnut case.
Cathy Priestner Allinger, SLOC’s managing director of sport and a silver-medal Canadian speed skate, said, “it’s the most unique medal I’ve ever seen. I love the free form”. She found them “really tangible…almost three-dimensional” with designs that provide “concrete evidence of what you achieved and that five, 10, 20 years later has the same meaning to you”.
“It’s not gaudy”, said Andy Gabel, a 1994 silver medalist in speed skating and SLOC’s director of figure skating and short track. He added, it’s “nice and simple”.
Another 5,520 smaller participation medals have also been produced along with 30,000 commemorative medals for volunteers and officials.
