What’s in a medal?

It’s remembered as a dud Olympics, riddled with poor venues and dodgy results, and held in a city so hard to reach that athletes from most of the world stayed away.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of St Louis 1904 was the 96 gold medals awarded. For the first, and almost last, time they were solid gold, according to the Olympic Studies Centre.

Perhaps reflecting the state of the world in the first Olympics after the Great War, by the time of the Antwerp Games in 1920 — the first since Stockholm in 1912 — solid gold medals were out. They’d never return.

Gilt silver (silver which has been gilded with gold) would be the precious metal of choice until 1996, except at Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988 when at least five grams of fine gold was added.

By Sydney 2000, adding a few grams of gold over silver became the standard followed since — and will again be for Tokyo 2020 — although China included jade in the gold, silver and bronze medals’ mix for the first time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.