Why Winter Olympic medals broke and what the failure revealed

Italy promised durable Olympic medals. Science had other plans.

By Eric Sullivan edited by Andrea Thompson

From skating to curling, the thrilling sports of the Winter Olympics have plenty of science behind them. Follow our coverage here to learn more.

Breezy Johnson had just won gold for the U.S. in downhill skiing. Moments after it went around her neck, she jumped up and down—and it broke.

The ribbon attachment snapped clean. She wasn’t alone. A video of U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu’s medal dangling ribbonless made the rounds on social media. German biathlete Justus Strelow watched his bronze clatter to the floor mid-victory-dance on live television.

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What made this particularly awkward was something Giovanni Malagò, president of the organizing committee for this year’s Winter Olympics, had said at the medal unveiling ceremony in Venice last July: “I can assure you they won’t deteriorate.” The medals were produced by Italy’s own state mint from recycled metals melted in renewable-energy furnaces—a pointed contrast to the 2024 Summer Olympic medals, in Paris, which had developed what some athletes described as a crocodile-skin texture within weeks of the podium. Italy’s would be different. Italy’s would last.

Then Breezy Johnson jumped.

The organizing committee launched an investigation with the state mint. Within days, they announced a fix. They have not said what it was.

To understand what happened, it helps to talk nerdy metallurgy.

The medals feature an asymmetric design with two parts—one smooth, one textured—that are meant to fit together to represent the city of Milan and the town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, respectively urban and alpine. It’s the whole aesthetic concept of the Games compressed into about 500 grams of recycled metal. Per International Olympic Committee rules, “gold” medals are mostly silver—at least 92.5 percent—with a thin gold plating; silver medals are the same silver without the gilding. Bronze medals are mostly copper.

They’re beautiful objects. Rather than hanging from a traditional metal loop soldered to the outside, the ribbon feeds directly into an internal cavity hidden between the medal’s two halves. The setup relies on a breakaway safety clasp, a small mechanism engineered to pop open under force to prevent strangulation, like the badge lanyards at any conference. It was a sound idea, but the execution didn’t hold up.

Laura Bartlett, an associate professor of metallurgical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, says the primary failure could be as simple as an undersize part or a weak joint. “Maybe the section size was too small for the weight of the metal that it was supposed to support,” she says. In other words, the cross section may have been too skinny for a heavy medal. If the clasp was soldered or welded to the heavy silver body, contamination from the air could have introduced invisible weaknesses. “If you end up with a defect, like hydrogen porosity, for example, that is a defect that can bring the strength down at the joint area,” Bartlett says. (Think tiny bubbles trapped right where you need strength most.)

It’s tempting to blame the subfreezing mountain air for the breakages, but the metallurgy doesn’t back that up. When athletes reported their dropped medals denting or chipping, some speculated the cold had made the hardware brittle. Silver and gold, however, lack a ductile-to-brittle transformation point. “They’re just as ductile at room temperature, typically, as they are at negative five degrees Celsius,” Bartlett says.

Ductile doesn’t mean indestructible, though. “It’s quite ductile material, but it’s not very strong,” Bartlett says. “Silver or gold are pretty weak, and so, if you do drop it, you’re going to dent it no matter what.” A true crack—rather than a dent from a hard fall—would be much stranger, pointing to a preexisting casting defect, such as a “hot tear,” where internal stresses build up as the metal cools in its mold.

That mold is part of an intricate manufacturing process. To achieve the medal’s high level of aesthetic detail, Bartlett suspects the mint used investment casting—the kind of process you pick when you want crisp edges and fine surface detail. You start with a wax pattern, build a ceramic shell around it in repeated dips, burn out the wax and then pour molten metal into the cavity. Because the ceramic slurry is so fine—“like flour,” Bartlett says—it can capture details that other methods can’t.

You might assume the metal poured into that shell was the culprit because the mint proudly used recycled production waste rather than virgin silver. But Bartlett says we can cross that off the list of suspects, too. “Most foundries that melt and cast these types of metals, they start with a scrap mix,” she says. “You can refine it and turn even scrap into something that has just as good of properties as the original virgin metal.” Bartlett also notes that induction melting—the method the mint described using—is a very common, flexible way to melt metal, especially when scrap is part of the feedstock.

If the material is sound and the cold isn’t to blame, the problem likely loops right back to the original design of the hardware. Host cities have always wrestled with the gap between a beautiful concept and a functional object, and the ribbon attachment has been a persistent headache for decades. Olympic medals weren’t designed to be worn around the neck until 1960, when a laurel-leaf chain was introduced in Rome, and subsequently ribbons became standard. The shift to a ribbon-hung design introduced an engineering problem that no two Games have solved the same way, and they have solved it with varying success. The medals in the Turin 2006 Games bypassed the issue entirely by featuring a large hole at the center of the medal itself, with the ribbon elegantly threaded through the middle.

For its part, Paris 2024’s problem was chemical, not structural; athletes at the time complained that some medals discolored and flaked within weeks. The French mint reformulated its protective varnish after the European Union restricted chromium trioxide, a toxic chemical previously used to prevent corrosion. The replacement didn’t hold up, leaving copper-rich bronze particularly vulnerable to oxidation and turning some medals blotchy and uneven.

As medal designs have grown more ambitious, the physical demands have grown with them. A recycled-alloy medal with an asymmetric shape and a precision breakaway clasp, headed for subfreezing mountain air, is a much harder engineering problem than a stamped disk on a ribbon.