The Paris 2024 Olympic gold medal, heart, the Paris 2024 Paralympic, gold medal, proper, and silver medal, left, are introduced to the press, in Paris, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024.

Thibault Camus/AP

cover caption

toggle caption

Thibault Camus/AP

The Paris 2024 Olympic gold medal, heart, the Paris 2024 Paralympic, gold medal, proper, and silver medal, left, are introduced to the press, in Paris, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024.

Thibault Camus/AP

PARIS — An Olympic medal inlaid with a bit of the Eiffel Tower. How’s that for a monumental prize?

A hexagonal, polished chunk of iron taken from the long-lasting landmark is being embedded in every gold, silver and bronze medal that might be hung round athletes’ necks on the July 26-Aug. 11 Paris Games and Paralympics that observe.

Games organizers revealed their revolutionary design on Thursday.

Simone Biles has seven medals from her two earlier Olympics and LeBron James has two golds and one bronze from London, Beijing and Athens. But neither of these athletes who’re concentrating on the Paris Games nor any of the roughly 36,600 different medalists at 29 earlier Summer Olympics stretching again to 1896 ever owned one fairly like these.

By making historical past on the Games, Paris medalists will take a little bit of France and its historical past residence, too.

Here’s a deep dive into the medals which might be positive to wow:

Are these actually Eiffel Tower chunks?

Absolutely. The 330-meter (1,083-foot) tall tower is made from 18,038 iron elements. But it is also getting a bit long in the tooth. Built for the 1889 World’s Fair — which celebrated the a hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution — engineer Gustave Eiffel’s tower was solely supposed to face for 20 years.

Instead, it simply goes on and on — because of a little bit of rejuvenating surgical procedure every so often and fixed care. The 135-year-old tower is a veteran of two earlier Games — in 1900 and 1924, the final held in Paris.

The iron items embedded within the heart of the Olympic medals every weigh 18 grams (about two-thirds of an oz).

They had been reduce from girders and different bits that had been swapped out of the Eiffel Tower throughout renovations and saved for safekeeping, in response to Joachim Roncin, head of design on the Paris Games organizing committee.

“The concept came after a few discussions. We realized that there’s one symbol known across the world, which is the Eiffel Tower,” Roncin stated. “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, what if we approached the Eiffel Tower Operating Co. to see if it’s possible to get a bit of the Eiffel Tower to integrate into the medal?'”

The firm agreed, and “the dream became reality,” he stated. “It’s really a bit of metal from the Eiffel Tower.”

How had been the chunks ready?

They had been stripped of paint, polished and varnished for his or her second life.

They are stamped with “Paris 2024” and the Games brand — which appears to be like like a flame or the face of a girl with an elegant bob haircut. The 5 Olympic rings are additionally stamped on the iron of the Olympic medals. The Paralympic brand of three swooshes, often known as the Agitos, is stamped on the medals for the Aug. 28-Sept. 8 Paralympics.

The iron items’ hexagonal kind represents France. The French typically seek advice from their nation as “L’Hexagone” — the hexagon — due to its form.

Paris jewellery home Chaumet designed the medals. Six small clasps that maintain the iron items within the medals are a wink on the 2.5 million rivets that bind the Eiffel Tower collectively.

Around the iron items are disks of gold, silver or bronze. They’re crinkled to mirror the sunshine, making the medals shine. Games organizers say the steel is all recycled, not newly mined.

Are Paris’ medals distinctive?

Yes. Olympic medals have tended to be quite sober. In what was a primary, medals for the 2008 Beijing Olympics contained inlaid jade disks. But Paris is the one host metropolis to incorporate chunks of a well-known monument.

“Having a gold medal is already something incredible. But we wanted to add this French touch and we thought that the Eiffel Tower would be this cherry on the top,” Roncin stated.

“Having a piece of it is a piece of history.”

The historical Greek goddess of victory, Nike, options on the Olympic medals’ different facet — as she has performed at each Games since 1928. But Paris has additionally added a small illustration of the Eiffel Tower on that facet, in one other break with custom.

The different facet of the Paralympic medals reveals a view of the tower as if wanting upward from beneath. For visually impaired individuals, “Paris 2024” is written in Braille and the perimeters have notches: one for gold, two for silver, three for bronze.

By the numbers

The Paris Mint is manufacturing 5,084 medals — about 2,600 for the Olympics and a couple of,400 for the Paralympics. That is probably going greater than might be required. Some might be saved in case that medals have to reassigned after the Games, which might occur when medal-winners are subsequently stripped of the prizes for doping. Some go to museums. Any different spares could possibly be destroyed.

The gold medals weigh 529 grams and will not be pure gold. They are made from silver and plated with 6 grams of gold.

The silvers weigh 525 grams.

The bronzes weigh 455 grams and are a copper, tin and zinc alloy.

The medals are 85 millimeters throughout and 9.2 millimeters thick.

They’ll are available a dark-blue field from Chaumet and a certificates from the Eiffel Tower Operating Co. that the iron items got here from the monument. Paris organizers did not give a financial worth for the medals.