How much is an Olympic Gold medal worth?

The Tokyo Olympic Games are coming up, running from 23rd July to 8th August and around 10,000 athletes are competing for a spot on the victory podium For those who strike gold, the value of the medal is around £646, based on current market prices.

Today’s gold medals are not fully gold and are instead mostly silver. A shortage of the precious metal in World War I meant that fully gold medals were no longer given out after the 1912 Olympic Games.

However, the value of a medal is so much more than the metal it is made of — it’s a piece of history.

One of the four gold medals won by Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics was sold for over $1.4 million in 2013.

Anthony Ervin’s gold medal from the Sydney 2000 Olympics was sold for $17,100 to help raise money for the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which killed over 227,000 people.

But understandably most Olympians choose to hang on to their medals.