What the value of an Olympic medal?

Answer 1

That will depend on the medal- gold, silver or bronze. However, the "gold" medal is actually mostly silver. At today's prices. the "gold" medal has a metal value of $548. If you are a US gold medalist, you do get a bonus of $25,000. Other nations pay different awards to medalists.

Answer 2

As C3 Shooter says, the gold medal is really almost entirely silver, with a thin layer of gold on the outside. The medals are different for each Games; the mass has varied from a low of around 21g in 1904 and 1908 to a high of 500g (over a pound) each at the 2016 Rio games. The trend has overall been upward, though the 1904 and 1908 medals were less than half the mass of those in the original modern Olympics in 1896 (47g), and the mass spiked far above the trend in a few games (The medals in Rome 1960 were 211 g, compared to 68g and 62g in the ones immediately before and after respectively).

The medals for the Winter games have also varied in size, but on the whole tend to be larger than those of the Summer games (the record high being 576g for some of the medals in Vancouver 2010).

Even though the Rio "gold" medals are mostly silver, gold is worth so much more than silver that that the relatively small amount of gold makes a significant difference in the overall metal value of the gold and silver medals; the gold medals in Rio are worth a little under twice as much as the silver ones (the metal value of the bronze medals is so low ... well under $10 ... that the US does not even bother to tax it; gold and silver medalists ARE taxed on the metal value of their medals).

There's also the rarity value, which is much more subjective. However, authentic Olympic medals have been auctioned in the past, so we have some idea. A gold medal in one of the less popular sports, without a highly famous name associated with it, might sell for around $10,000 at auction; one of the gold medals won by Jesse Owens in 1936 went for almost $1.5 million in a 2013 auction.