All About The Medles

Now that we have won 4 Gold medals I thought it would be cool to let you know how they were made…

Medalists at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will celebrate with circuit boards hanging from their necks.

That's right. Gold, silver, and bronze medals for the games will contain metal from recycled TVs, computers, and keyboards that might have otherwise ended up as e-waste. In an Olympic first, each medal will be unique, featuring part of an image cropped from two large master artworks by Corrine Hunt, a Canadian designer and artist of Komoyue and Tlingit heritage based in Vancouver, B.C.

For example, each medal will include its own signature elements of the orca and raven artwork, such as the suggestion of the orca's eye, the curve of its dorsal fin or the contours of the raven's wing. Also, the medals are wavy rather than flat, a form inspired by the ocean waves, drifting snow, and mountainous landscapes found in the Games region and throughout Canada.

Guided by tradition

"The orca is a beautiful creature that is strong but also lives within a community. I felt the Olympic Games are a community, too, " said Hunt.

"The athletes may be training but they're always somehow connected to their community, to their teammates, or to their country. The orca is a creature that has wonderful capabilities but can't really survive without its pod," she said.

"My design for the Paralympic medal — a raven on a totem rising — is close to my heart and in honour of my uncle who is a paraplegic. The raven is a creature that is all things and I think Paralympic athletes have that in them," she said.

"They're sometimes given challenges and they rise above them and the raven does the same. I think the creativity of the raven gives us hope — to accept when things don't work out and really rejoice when they do," said Hunt.

The Olympic medals are circular in shape, while the Paralympic medals are a superellipse, or squared circle, drawn from traditional West Coast native designs. At more than 500 grams each, the medals are amongst the heaviest in Olympic and Paralympic history.

The medals by the numbers:

• –20 C was the temperature used to test them.
• 2 designers created them.
• 2.05 kg of Teck's gold were used to make them.
• 6 g of gold plating were used for each gold medal.
• 6.8 metric tonnes of scrap circuit board was diverted from landfills to make them.
• 9 times each medal was struck to shape it into the undulating form.
• 30 steps were used by the Royal Canadian Mint to make them.
• 34 mint engineers, engravers, die technicians, machinists and production experts manufactured them.
• 48 medal design ideas were submitted by artists across Canada and internationally.
• 90 kg is the weight the ribbons can withstand.
• 95 mm is the width of the Paralympic medals.
• 399 Paralympic medals were produced.
• 615 Olympic medals were produced.
• 903 kg of copper were provided by Teck for the bronze medals.
• 1,014 different crops of the two master aboriginal artworks were laser etched into each one-of-a-kind medal.
• 1,950 kg of silver was used for the silver medals.
• 2,817 hours of precision manufacturing was needed to produce them.

"For me, it was really important that in some way every medal would be completely unique from every other medal; and yet be connected to each other and to Corrine's larger artworks in some profound manner. It's a beautiful idea because it means on a conceptual level you need all the medals together to complete the artworks," said Arbel.

On the reverse side, the medals contain the official names of the Games in English and French, the official languages of Canada and the Olympic Movement, as well as Vancouver 2010's emblems and the name of the sport and the event the medal was awarded in.

On the Paralympic medals, Braille is also used and the Games motto, "With Glowing Hearts/Des plus brilliants exploits," is written in white lettering on the medal's blue and green ribbon.

It really is a green Olympics… fingers crossed we win another gold tonight in Ice Dance!