Q: The Canada Winter Games have concluded, and the athletes have gone home with their medals. When and where did the practice of giving medals to winners of athletic competitions start? And why are the medals gold, silver and bronze?
A: During the two weeks of the 2015 Canada Winter Games 2,400 athletes competed in multiple events in 19 disciplines, resulting in about 1,000 medals being awarded.
But why give medals at all? The short answer is because multi-sport events like the Canada Winter Games and the 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, being hosted in Toronto this July, are modeled after the modern Olympics.
Since the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Olympic athletes have earned gold, silver and bronze medals for first, second and third place.
(As a note of interest, the medals presented at the St. Louis Olympics were true medals -designed to be pinned to the chest like military medals. It wasn't until the 1960 Olympics in Rome that Olympic medals were designed to be worn from a chain or ribbon around the winners' neck. So technically, since 1960, Olympic medals are actually medallions.)
The gold, silver, bronze tradition was not a part of the original Olympics in Ancient Greece, or the first two modern Olympics.
According to the International Olympic Committee, at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, first place winners were awarded a silver medal, olive branch and a diploma. Second-place winners received a copper medal, laurel branch and a diploma, and third-place received nothing.
At the 1900 Paris Olympics, winners received a mixture of cups, trophies and cash prizes. However, winners were later retroactively awarded gold, silver and bronze winners' plaques to bring the Games into line with later Olympics.
During the ancient Olympics, only the first place winner was recognized. According to the International Olympic Committee, in the ancient Games a herald would announce the winner's name immediately after the competition.
Then a Hellanodikis (Greek judge) would place a palm branch in the winner's hands, and red ribbons were tied on his head and hands as a mark of victory -all while the crowd cheered and threw flowers.
On the final day of the ancient Olympics, the winners would gather at the temple of Zeus, where heralds would announce each of the winners, the names of their fathers and their homeland.
A Hellanodikis would then place a kotinos -a wreath made from branches of a sacred olive tree that grew at Olympia -on each winners' head.
The practice of awarding medals and medallions dates back almost as far as the ancient Olympics.
First century Roman-Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus, in his histories of the Jewish people, wrote that Alexander the Great awarded a "golden button, which it is custom to give the king's kinsmen" to one of his Hebrew allies. Ancient Roman emperors awarded medals both for military victories and to political allies.
The practice of awarding medals to political allies, mark important battles and as symbols of religious faith was revived in Europe in the late Medieval period.
By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was common for armies and navies to issue medals to soldiers and officers who took part in specific battles or campaigns - almost always victorious ones.
In general gold medals were reserved for high-ranking officers (such as the British Army Gold Medal issued between 1808 and 1814 to officers who commanded at least a battalion during the Napoleonic Wars).
Lower-ranking officers and enlisted soldiers and sailors were more likely to be presented silver and bronze medals (such as the silver Waterloo Medal presented to British troops of all ranks who took part in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, or the bronze medal issued to all British sailors of all ranks who took part in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805).
During the 19th century it appears organized sporting groups took this idea of medals being tied to victories, and starting awarding medals to competition winners.
At first, there was no consistent system - each competition was different, and the prizes awarded were based on the organizers' decisions.
I couldn't track down a specific event when gold, silver and bronze sports medals were given out for the first time.
However an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Aug. 15, 1884 describes a multi-sport athletics competition being organized by the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America at the Williamsburgh Athletics Club in New York for Sept. 27, 1884.
The Eagle reported, "In each event the winner will be given a gold championship medal; a silver medal to the second, and to the third man a bronze medal."
The medal system was still novel enough at that time that the paper through it was necessary to explain it -and a story in the same issue about a multi-sport event held at Myrtle Avenue Park in New York on Aug. 14, 1884 describes winners receiving gold medals, but makes no mention of any other medals being awarded.
The now-defunct National Association of Amateur Athletes of America was founded in 1879, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, to host U.S. national athletic championships. By 1888 it was replaced by the Amateur Athletic Union.
The Amateur Athletic Union worked closely with the Olympic movement, and helped organize American participation in the Olympics.
So, while this is conjecture on my part, it seems likely the gold, silver, bronze system was either invented by, or adopted by, the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America for its national, multi-sport events. This tradition was passed on to the Amateur Athletic Union, which introduced the system to the Olympics in 1904 when St. Louis hosted the Games.
Some sources I consulted suggested the choice of gold, silver and bronze corresponds to the three Ages of Man in Ancient Greek mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Bronze Age. However, I could not confirm that.
A more practical reason to use gold, silver and bronze (which is a copper alloy, historically made with tin or arsenic) is they were already in common use for military medals, coins, jewellery and decoration.
Gold, silver and bronze are durable enough to withstand handling, are easy to cast and work with, resist oxidization and look nice and shiny.
Incidentally, copper, silver and gold are all part of the same group on the periodic table and, like many elements in the same group, share many common properties. One of those properties is that all three can be found naturally occurring in relatively pure forms, which meant they were some of the earliest metals human learned how to mine and use.
Copper is lightest and most common, at 0.0068 per cent of the Earth's crust. Silver is heavier and only makes up 0.000008 per cent of the Earth's crush, while gold is most dense of the three and makes up a mere 0.0000004 of the Earth's crust.
Correspondingly, copper is also the cheapest of three metals and gold is the most expensive.
As of Friday, copper was trading on the commodity markets for about $7.28 per kilogram, silver was $670.58 per kilogram and gold was worth $47,474.67 per kilogram.
Because gold is so expensive, very few "gold" sporting medals are actually pure gold. Most, including all Olympic medals after the 1912 Games in Stockholm, are gold-plated silver.
So it seems likely that the practice of giving gold, silver and bronze medals has its origins in American amateur sport in the late 19th century -inspired by military medals which date back to the time of Alexander the Great, but not to the ancient Olympics themselves.
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