The spectacular Mo Farah was the subject of this photo, which due to the angle looks like he’s biting down to make sure it’s a real gold medal and not just gold painted tin.
Credit: Telegraph
Update: Reader SP suggests that it’s not the angle of the photo but that he actually is chowing down on aurum.
He probably is biting it, and a lot of athletes make the same pose- I saw the swimmers do it too.
Five more instances, along with a story that claims they do it because photographers ask them to:
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/09/13199602-taking-a-bite-out-of-olympic-gold-athletes-try-to-eat-their-medals
Thanks for the link…there’s gotta be a caption contest in there somewhere.
They’re just demonstrating what the tax man will do to their medals.
The irony being that Olympic gold medals are NOT solid gold, but gold-plated silver.
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-08-09/living/living_olympians-bite-medals_1_jim-greensfelder-olympic-gold-sanya-richards-ross
It’s an old tradition to bite a gold coin as a rough test of its content. I’ve never found out, though, how the test works. The best I can do is a guess that you actually scrape it with your teeth, not bite, to see if there’s something else under gold plating, which is fairly soft.
…or maybe fake gold coins were made of lead (easy to cast, and to simulate gold’s weight) and therefore soft enough to actually bite into?
[i][...]
There is an age-old tradition of biting gold to test its authenticity. Although this is certainly not a professional way of examining gold, the [/i]bite test[i] was not to check if the coin was gold (90% gold coins are fairly strong) but to see if the coin was gold plated lead. A lead coin would be very soft and thus teeth marks would result. Fake gold coins were a common problem before 1932 so weighing a coin and also sliding a coin through a “counterfeit detector” slot was common (making a lead coin thicker would add weight thus why slide it through a measured slot). Most establishments (especially US Western saloons) would never accept a gold (or silver) coin of high value before weighing such an item.[
[...][/i]
Gold
Of course that was then and this is now. Nowadays if you want to do this, you use tungsten, not lead. Tungsten is close enough in density that such superficial tests will not work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Gold_substitution
You’re welcome to now go down the conspiracy theory rathole that most of the gold bars in the world’s banks have had their gold replaced with tungsten.
(Heck it’s likely even true that Paul Ryan believes this or some variant of it.)
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/25/the-problem-of-fake-gold-bars/
I wonder whether Ron Paul chews his gold bars lovingly every night? Might lead poisoning explain his derangement?