Why do athletes bite their gold medals? The story behind the tradition
Drawing the lips back to bite the medal gives an approximation of a smile, and that looks good in newspapers and magazines. | Photo Credit: AP
Drawing the lips back to bite the medal gives an approximation of a smile, and that looks good in newspapers and magazines. | Photo Credit: AP
I was present at the birth of a tradition that survives to this day. My friend and I were walking down a Bangalore street (now called Bengaluru street) when we saw a dog just about to do its business by the side of the road. “Quick,” said my friend, “let us link our forefingers. It will stop the dog from messing the place.”
It was so spontaneous, so absurd, so bizarre that I quickly linked my forefinger with his, and a tradition was born. Dogs, who had never heard of this technique to stop them in mid-relief did not bother, of course. But it quickly caught on among our friends and in later years, their children. No one believes it will lead to anything, but they do it for a laugh. And to pay a tribute to my friend’s sense of humour.
I was reminded of this when a sporting ‘tradition’ returned to the news. It hadn’t actually left it, for there’s always someone wanting to know why athletes bite their gold medals.
In the 19th century, merchants and gold prospectors bit into gold coins to check their purity, arguing that since gold is a soft metal, it would leave a mark that counterfeit metal would not. Was it successful or foolproof? I have no idea, but it was popular.
Gold medals awarded at competitions are usually 90 per cent silver (often less) and plated with gold. The cost of pure gold medals would ruin the organisers, and probably give the athletes a pain in the neck because they would be so heavy. Winning might turn out to be back-breaking!
Today, the bite doesn’t test anything except the strength of the athlete’s teeth. That not all athletes have good teeth, whatever the state of their biceps was proved by Germany’s David Moller, who bit his medal at the Winter Olympics in 2010 only to have a tooth chip off. Some recent athletes have compromised. They don’t actually bite their medal but simply pretend to in order to preserve their teeth and thus have no need to reorganise their smiles.
The modern practice might have started in the early years of the 20th century probably as a continuation of the 19th century one. But today’s automatic response was probably initiated by photographers looking for an expressive shot. Drawing the lips back to bite the medal gives an approximation of a smile, and that looks good in newspapers and magazines.
“It’s become an obsession with the photographers,” David Wallechinsky, then president of the International Society of Olympic Historians and co-author of The Complete Book of the Olympics told CNN in 2012. “I think they look at it as an iconic shot, as something that you can probably sell. I don’t think it’s something the athletes would probably do on their own.”
So, photographers insist on it, and the athletes are happy to play along. Just as a joke. You can’t be dogmatic about this, as my friend who began the dog tradition might have said.
Published on Oct 31, 2026
More stories from this issue
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.