The Asian Games Gold Medal Is 264 Grams of Silver and One Gram of Gold
The Asian Games are on in Japan until 4 October, and more than 15,000 athletes are competing for gold medals that are not made of gold.
That is not a complaint. It is a useful fact, and it happens to explain the single most important thing we tell people at our counters.
What an Aichi-Nagoya medal actually is
The organisers publish the specifications. All three medals are 80mm across and 5mm thick, and the composition was reported in detail by Business Standard.
| Medal | What it is made of | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Gold | Pure silver, plated with at least 1 g of gold | 265 g |
| Silver | Pure silver | 264 g |
| Bronze | Red brass, 95% copper and 5% zinc | 222 g |
Read the top two rows together. A gold medal and a silver medal are the same object, one gram apart, and that gram is the plating.
First place and second place are separated by a gram of gold. Everything else about the two discs is identical.
How little gold that is
One gram on a 265 gram medal works out at 0.38% gold by weight.
Hold that against the number stamped on a chain in any shop in Singapore. 916 means 91.6% gold, by definition and by mass. The medal is named after a metal it barely contains.
If that 265 gram disc were solid 999 gold instead of plated silver, at the rate we recorded on 1 September it would be worth about S$47,560 in metal alone. The gold that is actually on it is worth about S$179.
Nobody minds, and nobody should. An Olympic or Asian Games medal is worth what it represents, and no athlete is melting one down. The value is the four years, not the four hundred dollars.
Where this stops being charming
A medal is honest about itself. The specification is published, everyone knows what it is, and the word "gold" is describing a rank rather than a material.
The trouble starts when the same construction turns up in a shop and the word is describing the material.
Gold-plated brass sold as gold is the most common fraud in this trade, and it works because plating looks exactly like the real thing until you weigh it. A 916 stamp is a claim, not proof. We wrote the full testing guide, including the density check you can run at your kitchen table, in how to spot fake 916 gold.
Here is the difference that matters. Strip the plating off an Asian Games medal and you still have 264 grams of pure silver, which is a real metal with a real price. Strip the plating off a plated brass chain and you have brass. One is a finish on something valuable. The other is a disguise on something that is not.
The recycled part is the interesting bit
The Aichi-Nagoya medals come from the Recycled Medal Project, and some of the metal was recovered from small electronic devices donated by local municipalities.
That is a genuinely good idea and it points at something we have written about before. Gold is hard to get out of the ground, mine output has gone flat despite record prices, and the metal already above ground keeps getting recovered and reused instead. We went through those numbers in record gold mined, supply still flat.
The gold in a medal on a podium in Nagoya may well have spent its last decade inside somebody's phone. Gold does that. It is one of the reasons a piece you own holds its value in a way almost nothing else you buy does.
What a gram of gold buys you at home
One gram is a strange unit until you attach it to something.
It is the entire gold content of an Asian Games gold medal. It is also roughly a third of the weight of our 916 baby bracelet, which is 3.35 grams. And in a piece of jewellery, that gram is solid all the way through rather than a coating a few microns thick.
Any piece in any shop here is priced the same way:
Price = (gram weight × purity × the day's gold rate) + workmanship + 9% GST
Which is why the first question is always what it weighs, not what it is called. We ran that arithmetic on a fixed budget in what $500 buys in 916 gold, and publish the rate monthly in the gold price update.
The reframe: a medal is a symbol, a chain is an object
These two things are doing completely different jobs, and it is worth keeping them apart.
A medal's worth is entirely in what it certifies. Nobody weighs it, nobody insures it for the metal, and the gram of gold on the surface is there to make it the right colour for the rank. The object is a receipt for something that happened.
A gold chain is the opposite. Its worth is in the metal, it can be weighed by anyone in ten seconds, and it is the same 916 whether you bought it for a wedding or on a Tuesday for no reason. Nobody has to believe you about it.
The Asian Games are a good reminder that "gold" is sometimes a word about achievement and sometimes a word about mass, and that the two get confused mainly when somebody is selling.
At JJ Gold everything we sell is real 916 or 999 gold, never plated. We do not stock gold-plated jewellery at all. Every piece is weighed in front of you and hallmarked, with weight and purity written on the receipt, and you can bring in something you bought elsewhere and we will test it whether or not you sell it to us. If a piece sits past what you wanted to spend in one go, it can go on Shop Now, Pay Later with $0 down and up to 12-month instalments through Atome, PayLater by Grab, or SPayLater by Shopee, and we compare what each costs in our instalment guide.
An Asian Games gold medal is 265 grams, of which one gram is gold. A 916 chain is 91.6% gold all the way through. Both are called gold and only one of them is.
Bring anything you are unsure about and we will weigh it and test it in front of you. City Plaza #01-47 (810 Geylang Road, Singapore 409286) or Lucky Plaza #02-47 (304 Orchard Road, Singapore 238863). Call 8950 4377 for the day's rate before you make the trip.
Ask what it weighs. The name on it is the least reliable part.