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Why Olympians eat their medals

 It’s not uncommon for them to bite their gold, silver and bronze medals

Is it just me or have you also noticed how our brothers and sisters from the Rift have a predilection for picking odd English names: Hyvin, Helah,Visiline and Sammery for women, with men sporting names like Brimin (which was supposed to be Frimmin), Conceslus and Asbel, just to pick a few from our athletes.

Indeed, when they win, it’s not uncommon for them to bite their gold, silver and bronze medals. Just why do athletes momentarily turn them into snacks?

Sports historians David Wallechinsky and Jaime Loucky in the Complete History of the Olympics published in 2013, informs us on good authority that when gold coins were used as currency, a bite left a mark on the malleable metal, ascertaining its authenticity. And when gold medals were awarded when modern Olympics resumed in 1896, winners exposed them to the gnaw.

The last pure gold medals were awarded during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. The medals were becoming too expensive, yet the Games were not fully commercialised. Today’s medals are not pure gold, but silver coated in gold worth $564 (Sh57,000 for the 1.34 per cent gold there in), according to Forbes magazine.

So, why do athletes still behave like medals are chocolate coated?

During the 2012 London Olympics, Wallechinsky explained that it’s purely due to the sports photographers who instruct winners to bite them, in addition to holding them for the world to see. Biting results in unusual shots and thus the bite is not necessarily to test whether it’s genuine gold.

But one medallist took the biting too far and broke his tooth. German luge star David Moeller, bit his silver medal too hard after the podium ceremony during the 2012 Vancouver Winter Olympics and had to visit a dentist thereafter! Luge, for those not in the know, is a winter sport in which the contestants ride a flat sled lying face up and feet first while wearing a specially designed ice track allowing graving to increase the sled’s speed.

Did you know there are 25 athletes who received their gold medals a year after the podium ceremony since 1968? One of those is Kenya’s Asbel Kiprop, the kingpin of 1,500 metres race.

Kiprop won silver behind Bahrain’s Rashid Ramzi during the 2008 Beijing Games, but Ramzi was later disqualified after testing positive for doping and the medal was awarded to Kiprop, but minus the national anthem pealing round any stadium as the ceremony took place at the Intercon in Nairobi.

The 2016 Rio Games have seen Kenya miss medals in archery, rugby sevens, swimming and boxing, but as Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived modern Olympics, outlined: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well!”

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