I understand that the bite test was used by frontier merchants as a low-tech way to assay gold, which worked because elemental gold was softer than some of the less valuable alloys that might otherwise be mistaken for gold.
But Olympic gold medals contain less than 10% gold. They’re exactly the type of forgery the bite test is intended to root out. I’ve even seen athletes breaking their teeth on silver or bronze medals which makes even less sense to me.
Is it all just a big fuck you to the IOC, mocking them for being too cheap to spring for real gold?
Olympic athletes are on strict diets. They no longer have such dietary requirements once they’ve won.
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Bit those who lose are traditionally put down (shot and sold for glue) by the Queen herself.
I think at this point it’s just tradition and makes for a good photo. It doesn’t have anything to do with them being real gold anymore.
At this stage it’s a trope that people imitate, perhaps without really thinking about it. Originally it was almost certainly an ironic joke about the value of the medals, playing on the old-fashioned bite tests that would be used for for items of dubious worth
Its always been a lie.
You can’t have your chocolate gold metal and eat it too.
But you can keep the medal and eat the chocolate. It’s really a big middle finger to that whole idiom, now that you mention it.
Tradition. I think it’s just the photographers asking for the shot
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The gold surface gets dented, nothing more personalized than a medal with your teeth marks on it.
If I won a gold medal, I’d probably kiss it. Not bite it tho.
Just FYI the gold medal is made of silver with a gold surface. The silver medal is made of silver, for bronze IDK.
Or so it was in the Bejing olympics anyway (with an inlay on the back of the medal that specific olympics).
