Getting gold: which games are best?
For the athletes competing at an Olympic games, a gold medal means much more than the commodity it is made of. But what is the relative and market value of the precious metal in a medal?
Each Olympic gold medal has to contain six grams of gold, and the constant fluctuations in commodity prices – not to mention the impact of forex movement – can mean major leaps in the value of a medal from one games to the next. At the outset of Rio 2016, we took a look at which Olympians have benefitted most from the changing value of the gold in their medals.
But the differences in gold medal values don’t end there, as the relative value of a gold medal can also vary hugely from country to country thanks to currency values and price-purchasing power (PPP). So after the Olympic games, we analysed which countries did best in Rio when it came to the relative value of their gold medal haul.
Read our piece on medal prices
Olympics 2016: what's a gold medal worth?
And on relative medal value here:
Can you value gold medals in Big Macs?