I was curious about the medals, compositions, and materials costs so here's what I found.
The dimensions of the medals are specified as a minimum of 60mm diameter by 3mm thick. For a cylinder, that's 8.482 cm^3 volume per medal, minimum. The 2020 Olympics has 339 events, each with a gold, silver, and bronze medal. Market price I found for gold as of this post is $58.56/g and silver is $0.82/g. Gold has a density of 19.30 g/cm^3 and silver 10.49 g/cm^3. I'm not keeping track of sig figs because I don't care enough for a quick rundown.
For the gold medal, its composition is listed as minimum 92.5% silver with 6g of gold mixed in. I didn't see what the percentage specified (mass, volume) so I'll assume volume for silver henceforth. 7.845 cm^3 is 92.5% of min volume of a medal. This works out to 82.294 g of silver (7.845 cm^3 * 10.49 g/cm^3). Using market prices above, silver value: $67.48, gold value: $351.36, total materials value: $418.84.
Now, if the gold medal were solid gold, you'd have 163.703 g (8.482 cm^3 * 19.3 g/cm^3) of gold. Materials market value of the medal would be $9,586.
For the silver medal, it's 92.5 silver with nothing specified mixed in. So the identical silver component from the gold medal which means its total materials value is $67.48.
If the silver medal was pure silver, we'd have 88.976 g (8.482 cm^3 * 10.49 g/cm^3) and the materials value would be $72.96.
The bronze is 97% copper, 0.5% tin, and 2.5% zinc. I won't do this because I'm not interested, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Now the fun part, rough estimate of total material cost of existing gold and silver medal compositions for all 339 events: $164,862.48 (339 * ($418.84 + $67.48)).
Rough material cost if the gold medals were actually gold and the silver were actually silver: $3.274 million (339*($9,586 + $72.96). It would cost about 20x the current material costs to give the athletes more representitive and valuable medals. The total cost of this would be an additional ~$3.1 million to the host or whoever pays for it.
Very good point. I don't really watch sports and 339 was the best representitive number I could find for total medals awarded. I imagine if you knew how many medals were team based, the fixed sizes of teams that get medals, and so on you could work this out more accurately then.
From wikipedia: 'Some combat sports (such as boxing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling) award two bronze medals per competition, resulting in, overall, more bronze medals being awarded than the other colours."
The occasional tie could also push it the other way— an additional gold at the expense of a silver or likewise with two silvers instead of a silver + bronze.
The Tokyo medals are around 500g each, so while those are nice estimates for the minimum dimensions, if the Tokyo golds were of the same weight and heft they have been made (and also 100% base metal) then you’d be looking at around $15m USD just for the golds
Cool fast math! Seems like the cost to give out actual gold is super tiny compared to the amount the olympic committee charges for the games. They should give out solid gold or at least 18k to make it last longer with fewer scratches.
That’s misleading, gold ore can have an extremely high gold content. The comparison is to the minimum threshold for economic extraction and that’s from rocks via chemical leaching not electronics.
Ok, thank you. I went looking for the numbers before posting, but I mostly found the same "100 times" number repeated in different sources and decided to roll with it. Do you have some reference that could be used to inform instead?
As to economic viability, 44g/ton is the highest grade bulk ore being extracted, but much lower concentrations can be viable. Heap leaching is pouring diluted sodium cyanide over a pile of crushed ore this cheaply processes vast quantities of material which scales based on how cheap it is to extract the ore from the ground. For example at current gold prices an open pit mine with ore concentrations of 1g/ton is likely viable, but the deeper the mine the more expensive extraction becomes. 4g/ton is roughly the minimum for traditional mining. Similarly the total quality of ore available must be large enough to justify associated investments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_leaching#Precious_metals
As to gold content of electronic waste “ The electronic waste gold contents vary from 80 to more than 800 parts-per-million (ppm), and silver contents range from 250–350 ppm; no gold or silver is observed in the automotive waste material.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40831-016-0051-y
Anyway, 1 g/ton is ~1ppm so the 100 times number is a reasonable ballpark compared to low grade ore. The issue is Heap leaching doesn’t work on electronic waste and open pit mines are extracting at 10$/ton where handling costs for e-waste is vastly higher.
Small details like this make my day. I also love how it was basically crowdfunded by Japanese people. It quite strenghtens the symbolic value of the medal I think.
Canceling Olympics is difficult. Whoever cancels it, has to pay hefty fine, either the host or the Olympic committee. The pandemic is sadly not the valid reason to cancel them, at least not in committee's eyes, so Japan was strong handed here.
I don't know about your country, but every month from January to June (the latest data I found) a large majority of Germans polled believed the measures to fight COVID were appropriate or didn't go far enough. https://de.statista.com/infografik/23810/umfrage-zur-angemes...
I’m not sure what country you’re basing this on, but in the US the 2020 election felt like a repudiation of the more liberalized COVID-19 policies of the Trump administration.
People opt-in to crowdfunding. Generally we have no choice in paying taxes. That said some states like California give taxpayers the option to pay extra taxes for special funds like coastal cleanup or processing the rape kit backlog. These funds are more analogous to crowd funding, but they pale in comparison to total state revenue.
when and where from can I get myself a recycled electronics gold watch / earrings for my lady geek? I feel very confident that this is going to happen, now, but I'm fascinated by the economics of the acquisition of the e-waste, in terms of "ore" density : it's a while since I was marvelling at the sight of the gold pad to pin wires in a ceramic package. Where's the highest quality and concentrations now?
There are potential moral concerns with e-waste recycling. I won’t say it’s more problematic than mining. But many of the same issues with environmental degradation, dangerous work environments and child labor can apply.
I feel like any article on the Olympics should mention that >80% of the Japanese population was against holding the Olympics [1].
And that in most respects it has be a disaster, I've lost count of the number of scandals and resignations... [2] Rather than being good PR for Japan, it feels like it's been overwhelmingly negative.
On top of this, COVID19 infections are rapidly increasing (now at their highest level). While the government expands the state of emergency, asking people to restrict their activities while holding the largest sporting event in the world...
Olympics is such a massive waste of money that nobody except politicians who want to show off with taxpayer money or industrials benefiting from government contracts would be for it.
Every Olympics held in the United States has been profitable for the host city (and all but one in Canada) in large part because the infrastructure already exists.
Los Angeles is looking forward to having the games in 2028 because it gives them extra money to pay for infrastructure that they've been planning to build anyway.
San Francisco really wanted the 2028 games as well because it would have allowed us to finish building BART/CalTrain around the Bay, and we would have already had all the venues necessary with the various pro and college facilities around the Bay.
> Every Olympics held in the United States has been profitable for the host city (and all but one in Canada) in large part because the infrastructure already exists.
> As a result, in 1979 Los Angeles was the only city to bid for the 1984 Summer Olympics, allowing it to negotiate exceptionally favorable terms with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
> The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were the only games to produce a surplus, in large part because the city was able to rely on already existing infrastructure.
As the costs of hosting have skyrocketed, revenues cover only a fraction of expenditures. Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics generated $3.6 billion in revenue, compared with over $40 billion in costs, and London’s Summer Games in 2012 generated $5.2 billion compared with $18 billion in costs. What’s more, much of the revenue doesn’t go to the host—the IOC keeps more than half of all television revenue, typically the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.
Atlanta 96 was a great case study in this. Atlanta built a ton of infrastructure that continues to serve the city well. Many of the venues built in downtown and especially on the Georgia Tech campus went on to be very productive and useful. Georgia Tech has a world-class gym and still uses some of the olympic village as dorms as part of that legacy. There is one big exception - a massive tennis center built out in the suburbs. It was too far outside the city, never got much use and was demolished in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain_Tennis_Center
We benefited from it in London, I think we all wanted it too. Even if it kind of was an austerity Olympics compared to before it and after it? Sure we wasted some money here and there (was who the fuck needs a giant slide) but overall it turned an industrial wasteland into a useful area for East London.
The Olympics in London cost 11.3 Billion and generated revenue of 3.3 billion which doesn't exactly seem hugely beneficial.
Of course in the usual London fashion most of the money came out of UK govt coffers, national lottery funding etc - so it was just a form of London sucking cash out of the rest of the UK to build infra, via the handy "Olympics" excuse, so I can see how a londoner might argue it was good as it was a means of extracting resources from the rest of the country.
In the aggregate, it was just a giant waste of money especially for the 90% of the UK population that isn't in London.
I don't disagree with any particular point here but I'd like to point out that there are some second order effects from that investment money, it wasn't just "gone" and it didn't just go to the koffers of building contractors either.
I can give some examples;
1) Newham was a very impoverished area before the olympic stadium was set to move there. Now Stratford and Newham are desirable.. More desirable than Hackney which has been "up and coming" for as long as I lived there.
2) Internet in London is/was _abysmal_. Genuinely awful. I even wrote a exasperated blog post about it[0]. This was due to degraded and faulty ADSL being he only option and grossly oversubscribed even if it worked well- and the large providers only followed each other with fibre installations.
When the olympics rolled in there was an enormous infrastructure improvement - I even remember talking to some Telecity employees about it. -- That infrastructure was later sold on to last mile providers who expanded it a bit and I went from speeds worse than dial-up with frequent route drops to symmetric gigabit and IPv6 using a new company called "Hyperoptic". That was a real improvement for everyone in my area because they had given up on home internet. (no netflix, youtube, only basic banking websites possible).
It comes from London frequently having money lavished on it that other areas don’t (eg - check public transport [1]) - and usually accompanied with a self-fulfilling prophecy about how other areas don’t generate tax income (which of course is because they don’t have good infra and investment). And this situation has been very much engineered by the UK government over the last 40 years, it isn’t some state of nature.
I just want to chime in here and agree with this wholeheartedly.
There is a lot of self-fulfilment when it comes to London spending vs London generation of revenues.
It's famously the case that London props up almost the entire rest of the country. Scotland itself being a net-loss in terms of GDP.
I come from a City called Coventry, "investment" in the city is non-existent; the only investor right now is the University which has essentially bought the entire City over the last 10 years.
Why? Because "Coventry doesn't make money". Why does Coventry not make money? -- well, companies would never headquarter there because the infrastructure is not good enough and the networking connections are not compelling; even if you think it will save you money because it's cheaper to hire in Coventry (somewhere in the order of 1/3rd london salaries, 1/5th London commercial rents) it's still awkward because navigating the city requires making use of the awful public transport or buying a car[0] (which the city is close to capacity with already!)
Birmingham, Britains "second city" has only moderate investment compared to London (though insanely more than most other UK cities), but also feels destitute in the majority of areas, _especially_ when compared to London, the infrastructure is marginally better than Coventry but the prestige/networking/access is nearly no different.
This is many decades in the making, there is absolutely no way to compete with a city like London which is reaping the rewards of many decades of incredible investment which creates network effects which only serve to increase the gravitational pull of the city.
Born and raised in Coventry and still have family there.
Coventry has fought (as I see it) 2 major issues which have held it back.
Firstly as the center of the UK car industry and the Detroit of Britain its economic successes and failures have been tied closely to the ups and downs of UK car production. The collapse of that industry from the 1980s through to the early 2000s resulted in huge numbers of unemployed skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing workers. Manufacturing of that type and scale is not something governments can will into existence (and generally the efforts to do so have been at best non-ideal - see Rover's sale to BMW).
The other issue with Coventry is the well-intentioned but disastrous rebuilding of the city center following its flattening in WWII. The city center remains an uninviting concrete jungle with few non-retail businesses and almost no housing. Though the 1980s the inner core became a no-go area after dark and continues to have a bad reputation. Outside of University housing there is little reason for anyone to live anywhere but the suburbs (or in a neighboring town or city).
I would argue that Coventry does have excellent infrastructure and that is no part of why companies haven't wanted to move there. There are multiple trains per hour to London (and Birmingham) and is served by major motorways to London, Birmingham and Oxford (M6/M45/M69). Compared to most UK cities traffic seems manageable.
The expansion of Coventry University and University of Warwick (which despite its name is located in Coventry) may have been the best possible result for the city. How else could the UK government have spent money in the city to attract the size of employers that the city needs?
One the most frustrating things to me, and I say this as as a Southerner, was why they decided to build HS2 first, instead of linking up Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield first (HS3). Then building HS2 if it was necessary.
But now there is, yet another, infrastructure project that is connected to London.
Spreading investment around the UK would be a good thing, it would take the heat out of Southern property prices, if everyone wasn't compelled to find jobs in the same geographic area.
> The Olympics in London cost 11.3 Billion and generated revenue of 3.3 billion which doesn't exactly seem hugely beneficial.
Except it is one giant international PR and brand recognition event for the host country. TV ads cost in aggregate billions too and don’t bring any revenue immediately, doesn’t mean they are a waste of money.
Not to mention Olympics getting people interested in doing sports, which amid a global obesity upsurge, could also be worth more than nothing.
If this is true, why is there no evidence? Tourism in cities that have hosted the olympics doesn’t have an increase - certainly for london it didn’t. There’s no economic benefits in the years following for the host country that have been observed. It is doubtful that these second order benefits exist at all.
Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
How well can companies evidentiate their brand awareness campaigns? How well can an actress calculate returns from having attended a talk-show? Evidence of absence cannot reliably be inferred from an absence of evidence.
> Even for “name recognition” as an end in itself - cities like London and Tokyo are hardly backwaters in need of a PR boost.
Familiarity is not the same as salience. Coca Cola is known by virtually the entire world, that doesn't make them stop the ads or branding campaigns.
> If tackling obesity is such a priority, I’m sure there’s more direct and effective ways to tackle it with 11 billion quid.
Conceivable doesn't mean doable. There are many direct and effective ways of improving a great many things in the world, yet they don't happen.
Just like a great startup idea doesn't translate to a billion dollar revenue, political implementation doesn't spring into existence just from good ideas either.
>How well can companies evidentiate their brand awareness campaign?
Remarkably well actually. You can do things like ask people questions about the olympics and the sponsor city and then put them into cohorts based on their answers. From that, you can look at how much spending occurred in the target city from each cohort.
Of all the boroughs I've lived in, in London, the East Village (a.k.a. Olympic village) and the adjacent Queen Elizabeth Park is by far my favourite, and it's still improving. It has also had an impact on the surrounding areas which, negative in terms of gentrification and ridiculous house prices, but very positive in terms of the flourishing local economy and community.
Sure, I mean if you have the entire UK lavish money on a small area of London, that small area will benefit! Nobody would deny that nobody has benefitted from the olympics - a very small area of the country and a small number of companies contracted to build things benefited greatly, at the cost of the rest of the UK.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how other countries do it, but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site. There's been a bunch of apartments, etc, built around there since then because it basically became a suburb where you could live.
> but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site.
Why would you need the Olympics to have land repurposed. They were waiting for a good excuse? No need to have big expensive party if you could have done that in any other context. But then again you'd need to whole country to accept paying for making new apartments just in Sydney.
I am a bit split. If I’m reading it correctly, Wiki’s source is a journal’s comparing their simulation of what Sydney’s economy would have been without the Olympics, and the numbers published officially, with a twist on additional costs they think should be added to the official estimates.
> We simulated the behaviour of industries, households and government resulting from hosting the Games for each of eight Australian regions over the years from 1997 to 2005. Our results revealed that rather than producing an economic benefit the Sydney Games actually reduced Australian household consumption by $2.1 billion.
For comparison there are later reviews of the economics of the town with the 6 years after Olympics, with less simulation apparently, which come to a different conclusion https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/10360
I honestly don’t know which one is more trustworthy
Definitely not true. However, post hoc I am forced to admit it was not as colossal a waste of money as I'd expected, and honestly there was an astonishingly positive societal response. So, I was wrong, but I was not alone!
An astonishingly positive societal response which lasted how long? Do you think there have been long lasting benefits from that or was it just a nice few weeks? If the latter, which is my impression, I don't think that represents value for money at all.
You can never say that for sure because the money spent on organizing Olympics could have been used somewhere else (or not used at all, therefore decreasing taxation). It was certainly a waste for anyone not living in London in any case.
Watching the soccer made we think maybe we could get used to watching athletes compete in beautiful locations with no stadiums and crowds. Maybe you could do olympics really cheap with no tourists
Or do the Olympics always in the same place, instead of wasting energy building new installations around the globe every 4 years that will never be re-used.
The sentimental in me really appreciates what the Olympics stand for. There are many things bad in sports, but the idea of all the humans in the world sending delegates for a global sports competition is a good reminder of all the progress we’ve made. (I’m also a Eurovision fan)
I completely agree. The Olympic Games are a huge waste. The stadiums built in Rio for the 2016 games are standing there unused and unmanaged and slowly degrading. I think that it was a shame that Rio was chosen to host the Olympic games. Their country should have spent the money on the nearly 50 million people in poverty in Brazil. (source: https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/more-tha...)
There’s no lockdown (as this is normally understood) in Japan. This concept doesn’t really exist (because it’s legally difficult to implement without changing the constitution as I understand it).
There’s a state of emergency in Tokyo (now expanded to surrounding areas). But this doesn’t really restrict people very much.
Yes, the majority are against holding the Olympics now (or cancelling it if it’s not possible to postpone). But you’d likely find support for delaying the Olympics until after COVID-19 (whenever that might be).
> I think the majority is for a non-COVID olympics
When you phrase it like that it has me imagining make the 100m sprint for Covid athletes (maybe 80% SpO2?). It sounds quite interesting. So I guess I’m now part of the 20%.
> And that in most respects it has be a disaster, I've lost count of the number of scandals and resignations... [2] Rather than being good PR for Japan, it feels like it's been overwhelmingly negative.
You are basically describing every olympics I can remember and most that I’ve read about before my birth.
Assassinations, at least 5 decades of doping scandals by East Germany and USSR, ice skaters’ husbands attacking competitors, Hitler, etc.
The Olympics is a rage-inducing waste of taxpayer money, but I love watching gymnastics.
At least the Games serve to shine light on Japan's refusal to respect UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child, despite ratifying it in 1994.
Japan's Law incites and rewards Child Abductions by giving sole custody to the first abductor. Judicial visitation decisions are not enforced.
By refusing to protect the fundamental Right of Children to access both their parents directly and regularly, as per the CRC, Japan is a massive and frequent Child Right violator.
In 2019, Japan Minister of Justice publicly and cynically qualified the CRC of "non-binding", and the European Parliament's resolution denouncing the violations of being "unfunded".
Is is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 new children each year, the majority Japanese, have this basic Human Right violated in Japan.
Whole thing seems to be about the denied rights of parents, not children? Doesn’t mention what any child wants anywhere. Weird to dress it up as being about the children.
Children benefit to have both parents in their lives, especially when young and can not express consent.
There are enough studies and exemples in every other developed countries where it's the norm that it's not a matter of opinion.
The UN's CRC is indeed about Children's Human Rights.
The specific article in question being Art 9.3
People always have those rights, no matter where they live, their religion, their cast or what not. That's the definition of Universal.
However, they are sometimes not respected and it's the duty of the international community to lobby against the perpetrators especially when they took the moral engagement to recognise them officially.
It not the wild west, there are voluntarily agreed upon international treaties that can be brought as a base for these discussions.
Of course I do, even under a Human Right violating regime.
Human Rights transcend local authorities.
And this authority would be both wrong and illegitimate if it has endorsed those Rights by ratifying a treaty that defines them, and somehow doesn't "belive" in them as you put it.
If someone the other side of the world tells you that you have the right to freedom of religion, but the authority you live under disagrees, and the people on the other side of the world don't do anything about it, then in what sense do you have the right?
You don't - it's meaningless.
If I say I have decided that you have the universal inalienable right to beer, but where you live doesn't agree, and I don't do anything about it either, then have I really given you that right? Of course not.
I think what you're saying is that you think people should have these rights. Great. But they don't in practice, and so they aren't universal.
You still continue to say that people having their rights violated means they don't exist. That's a demonstrably false and illogical statement.
It's because people inherently have rights that they fight for them, and others take their side. Hence events like the French Revolution, the Abolition of slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement.
> You still continue to say that people having their rights violated means they don't exist.
Yes. What is the meaning of a right that nobody enforces?
It's just an aspiration, a wish, something you'd like to have or other people would like you to have. If nobody's enforcing it, it's not really a right. By definition.
> Hence events like the French Revolution, the Abolition of slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement.
These were fights to create rights. They didn't have them before.
It's so unfortunate! The 2020 Olympics was supposed to be the start of the new Reiwa Era, rebirth after the devastation of the 2011 quake, like the 1964 Olympics and 1970 expo were a sign of rebirth after the end of the war.
Already during our visits to Japan in 2017 and 2019 we could see a lot of infrastructure work going on all around, lots of optimistic Olympic advertising and countdowns. It really should have been an even presenting modern Japan to the whole world, with the expectation that many of the countless tourists who would go for the Olympics would like Japan and return.
But with covid this is all gone, a lot of expensive infrastructure that will take many years to pay back without all the tourists and possibly bad image of Japan on the international stage & dissatisfaction with the government and foreign organizations in the Japanese population.
A curious family tale: after the Spanish Civil War, my grandfather extracted gold and silver from broken devices like radios. Then he sold it in the black market to survive, and he briefly went to jail for smuggling. What a turn of life for a watchmaker.
I'm a bit surprised that there are more Silver than Copper and Zinc in electronics .
Quote: the government collected several million tonnes of equipment, and extracted 32 kilograms of gold, 3500 kilograms of silver and 2200 kilograms of copper and zinc for the bronze medals
I'm fairly sure that this is simply the amount that they recovered for the medals specifically, not all the copper and zinc they extracted from that equipment.
So where did all the non-gold material go? The millions of tons that wasn't precious metals? I see little point in recycling something if 99.99% by volume goes to the landfill anyway.
Profit. Recycling rare materials is profitable. Keeping stuff out of landfills is not really why stuff is recycled- thats why we had that whole crisis recently with Recycling materials building up with no destination
It does, because precious metals mining is environmentally intensive, and by recovering some from trashed electronics instead you're having to do a little bit less mining.
It's something like 31 tonnes of ore must be processed per ounce of gold yielded. That's a lot of energy, fuel, caustic chemicals, and polluting mine tailings.
No, way less resources are used in electronics recycling than in mining virgin resources. You're making a false equivalence here, or some weird kind of appeal to ignorance. Yes, it's true that some things are unknowable, but not this.
This seems like a reasonable opportunity to remind people of this fascinating story.
It's not exactly a story about eco-friendliness, but it involves gold medals and "recycling."
"When Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, [George] de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from taking them. After the war, he precipitated the gold out of the acid, and the Nobel Society recast Franck and von Laue's awards from the original gold. In 1958, de Hevesy received the Atoms for Peace Award for his pioneering use of radioactive isotopes to study metabolism. Over his career, he published almost 400 scientific publications."
As a retrocomputing enthusiast, I find this horrifying. I imagine the beautiful Sony NEWS, Sharp MZ’s, NEC PCs, Epson QX’s and so many other amazing machines that were crushed in order to make decorations.
It claims the medals are pure silver, but a 925 silver alloy or so would be more realistic? Probably just ignorance of the detail by the research behind the article.
It's not since it can be a great source of pride for people to see their nation represented by their best athletes. It's a display of the best humanity has to offer in the areas of physical endeavor, discipline, and endurance. Reducing everything's value to a function of its consumption of money and resources is a depressing and inhuman way of viewing the world and thankfully most people don't think this way. We're not robots.
It can be done conducting at one place instead of building and then leaving behind infra. See what happend to what was built last time in Brazil and guess how many Brazils are happy to hear what you said
The 10,000+ athletes who flew around the world and the 100,000-odd attendees who also flew around the world can all offset their emissions with that savings /sarcasm.
I love athletics and competition, but do the Olympics promote activity or more sedentariness? They are certainly devastating to the environment.
Out of interest do you think it's worth sacrificing international sport competitions for the sake of the environment? What level of travel would you support, are continental competitions ok? National competitions?
The olympics isn't the only international sports competition. It's just the most daft one. It groups unrelated sports together like a circus. It slaps ads, sponsorships, and as much scrooging as it can all over the footage and then ironically pays the athletes a pittance to boot, making them rely on outside sponsorship deals.
Most sports have world championships. They don't need the resources that the Olympics do, because they are sport specific and not necessarily sponsored by the government. If I'm American and I goto the world boxing championship, I don't need Biden's permission to represent America. If I win, then an American won. I just get listed as holding the title. The Olympics on the other hand is an ill scandal based on bribes, doping and awful bureaucracy.
Moving the athletes is effectively trivial for these completions. It’s the spectators and facilities which represent most of the pollution. Olympics is a huge outlier in terms of athletes and it’s still 100 spectators in the stands per 1 athlete.
I can't help but think this olympics will go into the history books with an asterisk. That probably has something to do with Biles stepping down. It just feels weird.
In the grand scheme of things, Biles stepping down is inconsequential, and it is definitely not a reason for an asterisk in the history books, no matter what this week's news cycle try to make you believe.
One year delay, and basically no live audience due to the still ongoing lockdowns and pandemic would be a reason for the asterisk.
Is it? Plenty of athletes say they don't feel well. The specificity about Biles is that she was the great favorite and abandoned at the last minute in the Olympics without much prior signals that it could happen. Tennis players for instance have talked about pressure, depression, the importance of mental preparation for decades now. Recently Them for instance admitted he had a terrible breakdown after so many efforts to finally win the US open and since then hasn't been able to do much. In cycling Dumoulin also recently had a break from his career because he felt too much pressure and too little joy, them dis a great come back at the Olympics. Ian Thorpe in his time spoke a lot about mental health amongst athletes, difficulties and depression.
For the competition that Biles competes in (all kinds of gymnastics) it is downright dangerous physically to compete without confidence because every small misstep can result in devastating injuries. That's not the case in many other sports.
We shouldn't have sports where you can increase your chances of winning by increasing your chances of becoming a quadriplegic or getting killed. Whether or not Biles should have pulled out of competition is moot, because her event(s) shouldn't exist in the first place.
Most (all?) sports increase the risk of injury when increasing the chance of winning. Running faster, jumping higher, etc... all increase the chance and severity of injury.
You can't increase your odds of winning an Olympic gold medal in running by increasing your chances of becoming a quadriplegic or suffering a traumatic brain injury. However you can for sports like gymnastics, snowboarding, and cycling.
This was significant because it was so last minute. It shows "no matter how far you went, you can always put your mental health first".
I think it's also significant because she's womam gymnast. Generally, they have been pushed really hard mentally. With a lot coming out in my country at least about bullying and other (non-sexual) abuse.
Mostly this was focused on pushing them to train harder, ignore pain, ignore feelings, and lose more weight.
In that context, having a female gymnast stand up and say "no I am not pushing past my limits" is a big deal. It looks like a break with the past of mental abuse. Hopefully putting gymnastics in a much healthier place.
Really? I view her as a coward. A hero doesn't run away from the battle because they feel bad. These athletes are meant to be the best of us, representing our countries to the world. Do you want your country to be associated with quitting, mental illness, etc?
I'm sure she made the best decision for herself, but that's quite the opposite of heroic. She let down a lot of people. Heroic is fighting through the problems and doing what you need to do despite that adversity, not giving into it and going home.
If you can't do that, is the olympic spirit to push anyway and damage yourself? Or is the olympic spirit to be honest with yourself and the rest of the world.
I also think that this decision took a lot of bravery for Biles. And I admire her for that.
>If you can't do that, is the olympic spirit to push anyway and damage yourself?
Traditionally, yes. The Olympic spirit is to be willing to push yourself as hard as necessary, through anything, even to the point of death, to win the gold. Quitting only brings shame and disgrace to you and your country.
I agree with what Simone Biles did, and I don't think anyone can judge her - only she knows what her headspace and capabilities were - but it was absolutely against what the Olympic spirit is supposed to be. Olympic competition often serves as a form of neo-eugenic nationalist propaganda (that our nation and its values creates genetically superior people and potential combatants to yours.) Imagine the furor if this were the 1980s and Simone Biles had quit and a Soviet gymnast had won the gold medal. Everyone in the US would be calling her a traitor and a coward.
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question, Google is your friend here. OP wasn't making an obscure reference, her name is headline news around much of the world at the moment.
The dimensions of the medals are specified as a minimum of 60mm diameter by 3mm thick. For a cylinder, that's 8.482 cm^3 volume per medal, minimum. The 2020 Olympics has 339 events, each with a gold, silver, and bronze medal. Market price I found for gold as of this post is $58.56/g and silver is $0.82/g. Gold has a density of 19.30 g/cm^3 and silver 10.49 g/cm^3. I'm not keeping track of sig figs because I don't care enough for a quick rundown.
For the gold medal, its composition is listed as minimum 92.5% silver with 6g of gold mixed in. I didn't see what the percentage specified (mass, volume) so I'll assume volume for silver henceforth. 7.845 cm^3 is 92.5% of min volume of a medal. This works out to 82.294 g of silver (7.845 cm^3 * 10.49 g/cm^3). Using market prices above, silver value: $67.48, gold value: $351.36, total materials value: $418.84.
Now, if the gold medal were solid gold, you'd have 163.703 g (8.482 cm^3 * 19.3 g/cm^3) of gold. Materials market value of the medal would be $9,586.
For the silver medal, it's 92.5 silver with nothing specified mixed in. So the identical silver component from the gold medal which means its total materials value is $67.48.
If the silver medal was pure silver, we'd have 88.976 g (8.482 cm^3 * 10.49 g/cm^3) and the materials value would be $72.96.
The bronze is 97% copper, 0.5% tin, and 2.5% zinc. I won't do this because I'm not interested, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Now the fun part, rough estimate of total material cost of existing gold and silver medal compositions for all 339 events: $164,862.48 (339 * ($418.84 + $67.48)).
Rough material cost if the gold medals were actually gold and the silver were actually silver: $3.274 million (339*($9,586 + $72.96). It would cost about 20x the current material costs to give the athletes more representitive and valuable medals. The total cost of this would be an additional ~$3.1 million to the host or whoever pays for it.