What Price Gold Medals

Surely
Not!  

I must be going mad, because I'm sure that this morning (21/08/12) I read that the Government want to hand-out Honours to Team GB winners!

The Price of a Gold?

Of the 412 grams that a London 2012 gold medal weighs roughly 6 grams are gold, 381 are silver and the remaining 25 copper. Giving a market price today of about $700.
       -Futures Magazine | Monday 6th August 2012

So that's the price of Olympic Gold!

It may surprise you to discover that it costs £9billion to host an Olympic Games.

So, forget the cost of policing (including bringing in the Army, Navy and Air Force)... Forget the national debt from hosting the 2012 Games... Forget even the cost of giving out all 302 Gold Medals (not to mention all the Silver and Bronze Medals also)... Forget how many starving children in Britain alone this would feed for a whole year! London is now certainly pathed with Gold -as it was renowned to be back in Dick Whittington's day.
A gong for every Gold Medal winner?

DAVID Cameron insisted yesterday that Britain’s Olympic heroes should be honoured by the Queen.
       -David Cameron, Prime Minister, in EXPRESS.co.uk | Tuesday 21st August 2012

The article above goes on to explain that Downing Street are cautiously advising that there are a limited amount of honours that the Queen can hand out per year, but Boris Johnson is pushing for each Gold Medal winner to be awarded an honour for their Olympic achievement.

However, stringent new rules this year have put pay to such things, so achieving Gold at the Olympics is not enough to ensure a place on the Queen's New Year Honours list it would seem! Four years ago, the GB Gold Medalists in Beigin were all awarded MBEs at least.

"It’s a shame we can’t recognise all of Team GB for what they did for the country. It’s what the public wants."
       -Clive Efford, Labour sports spokesman, in EXPRESS.co.uk | Tuesday 21st August 2012

Number Ten have been quoted as saying that honours are 'awarded on merit, not according to quotas'. So we will have to see!


Also this morning

"EUROPE is secretly preparing for the break-up of the single currency, a top Finnish politician let slip yesterday."
       -The Sun | Monday 20th August 2012

The Sun article tells of how Erkki Tuomioja, Finland’s foreign minister, let it out that it was now nearly impossible to keep the euro. This has come at a time when Greece is at a 'make or break' stage (whether they'd be the first country forced out of the euro). The Sun says that the "New Greek Premier Antonis Samaras is flying to Berlin and Paris this week to beg for two years’ more grace to repay the EU’s bailout money."

But things for Greece, and the euro, are not looking good -because Greek debts have not got smaller since the elections, but larger.


Putting this in context...
The Futures Magazine's article reported this information: (using the value of Gold Medals as a currency) to get the European countries out of (euro) debt, they would each have to win millions of Gold Medals.

To put it another way, every single person in Greece would have to win 56 Gold Medals to get the country out of its debt (that's 627,153,707 medals in total). That doesn't cover anyone's debt other that Greece's.

For 302 Golds per Olympics, that's equivalent of Greece winning Gold at every single event for well over two million Olympic Games (2,076,668 Olympics)! At that rate, it would take Greece 8,306,672 years!!

Now you know the price of Olympic Gold. Was it really worth all the cost?