The good news is that the Canadian pairs figure skating team of Sale and Pelletier won a gold medal. The bad news is that there aren’t an extra ones. The solution? O.C. Tanner, the Utah company that handcrafted Olympic medals for the Games had to scramble to produce them.
The company had made duplicate medals for dual winners in timed Olympic sports, “but there’s typically no ties in pairs figure skating” company spokesperson Adrian Gostick said yesterday. “Nobody anticipated this”.
The company was called Friday by Olympic organizers to produce gold medals for Sale and Pelletier. Each medal, distinct to its sport, requires 20 hours of handcrafting. O.C. Tanner had extra medal blanks for figure skating, saving it more than 12 hours of labour.
O.C. Tanner called in a skilled milling operator who was on vacation, to produce the medals.
Mitt Romney, the head of the Salt Lake Games, picked up the new medals in an armoured truck Friday night and delivered them to a safe until the International Skating Union awards them Sunday night.
