Athletes at the Paris Olympics will receive medals carrying an iron fragment from the iconic Eiffel Tower. Games organizers revealed their revolutionary design on Thursday, February 8.
Organizers of the Games said Thursday that each of the 5,084 medals created for the Paris events will be decorated on one side with a hexagon-shaped piece of iron recovered from the French capital’s iconic landmark.
“This exceptional object had to meet another very strong symbol of our country and our capital,” Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, said at an event to unveil the medals’ design in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris where several Olympic events will be held.
Stripped of their brown paint and polished, each fragment will weigh 18 grams, or just over half an ounce, and be fashioned into a hexagon — the shape of France.
“We wanted this medal to be beautiful, we wanted it to be symbolic, and what is more symbolic than bringing back home a piece of France’s heritage,” Martin Fourcade, a five-time Olympic champion who also is president of the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Commission, said at the presentation.
“It makes me proud to be French,” added Béatrice Hess, a French former swimmer with 20 Paralympic titles. “It’s a jewel.”
Paris’ unique Olympic medals
According to Joachim Roncin, head of design at 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.”
“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 said. “Having a piece of it is a piece of history.”
The ancient Greek goddess of victory, Nike, features on the Olympic medals’ other side — as she has done at every Games since 1928. But Paris has also added a small representation of the Eiffel Tower on that side, in another break with tradition.
The other side of the Paralympic medals shows a view of the tower as if looking upward from underneath. For visually impaired people, “Paris 2024” is written in Braille and the edges have notches: one for gold, two for silver, three for bronze.
Sherjeel Malik is the editor at FanHaat with a writing experience in multiple sports. He oversees the editorial and content coverage at FanHaat and writes often around combat sports, football and other marquee sports. A professional highlight of his career was when WWE’s Paul Heyman shared one of his articles on his social media.
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