Paris Announces Olympic Medals Will Be Made From Eiffel Metals

Eiffel (Photo: Antara)

JAKARTA - The organizers of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics announced that 5,084 medals would be used in the competition. Where the medal was made using metal material taken from a piece of the Eiffel Tower.

A total of 5,084 gold, silver and bronze medals for the Paris Olympics will be in the form of six-sided pieces designed by French jewelry house Chaumet.

"We want to offer all medalists at the Olympics and Paris Paralympics a piece of Eiffel Tower from 1889," local organizing committee chairman Tony Estanguet said at the launch of the medal design citing Antara.

"It will be the most valuable metal combination of gold, silver and bronze medals with the most valuable metal in our country, from the treasure, namely the Eiffel Tower," he said.

The medal that Chaumet has designed, a jewelry house for French aristocrats since 1780, features a six-sided medal but still uses a scintillating circle background. A six-sided design is also used to describe mainland French contours.

The metal pieces for the medal were taken from a warehouse in Paris which was used to store pieces by the tower management company as high as 330 meters.

"We know that over the years during the maintenance of the Eiffel Tower, they are required to move some of the original structures," said Paris Olympics Branding Director Thierry Reboul.

"We used these pieces. The amount was more than enough," he said, adding that the medal had a weight of about half a kilogram.

Previously, medals at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics used recycled metals from electronic waste for each medal.