I once calculated it and came to the conclusion it was easily doable for the medals to be pure gold. Let's take the Rio 2016 medal as a reference. It has 494g

I once calculated it and came to the conclusion it was easily doable for the medals to be pure gold. Let's take the Rio 2016 medal as a reference. It has 494g of silver and 6g of gold. For a cost of $564 [1]. There were 307 gold medals awarded[2]. This comes to a total of 173148$ for the medals. Let's take the worst possible conversion. i.e. you want a solid gold medal with the same volume as the original. Silver has a density of 10,49g per cubic centimeter and gold has a density of 19.32g per cubic centimeter. So to get the same volume we need 910g of gold to replace the silver. Price of gold per gram in 2016 was about 40$. So this 910g of gold would cost 36400$. For a total gold medal price of 53,329,584$. Let's ignore the silver you no longer need since it's not that significant. For reference the entirety of the rio olympics cost 13.2 billion[3]. Having solid gold medals would be about 0.4% additional cost. Yes it's a lot of money but it doesn't seem unrealistic to me at all. [1] https://somethingborrowedpdx.com/how-much-does-a-olympic-gold-medal-worth/ https://somethingborrowedpdx.com/how-much-does-a-olympic-gol... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Summer_Olympics_medal_table#:~:text=The%202016%20Summer%20Olympic%20program,medal%20sets%20to%20be%20distributed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab.... [3] https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1051553/cost-of-rio-2016-olympics-rises-to-132-billion-35-billion-over-budget https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1051553/cost-of-rio-...