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Beijing Games Unveils Victory Medals

Their front side is traditional. There’s Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, where the first Modern Olympic Games was held in 1896 thanks to the tireless efforts of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

It’s the reverse side that makes it a perfect blend of the West and East, rather Chinese. A ring of elegance, nobility and virtue adds that essential touch of Chinese culture to the medals. And as any Chinese would tell you, the ring couldn’t be made of anything but jade for only jade can represent all the three qualities.

The gold medal has a white jade ring, and the silver, a greenish-white ring. Grey jade adds glitter to the bronze.

When the medals were first exhibited in late March 2007, Executive Vice-President Jiang Xiaoyu of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) said, “The medals are the result of many people’s hard work and enthusiasm, and they represent the elegance and style of Chinese art. They are a harmonious combination of the Chinese and Olympic cultures.”

For Clinton Dines, “The medals embody China’s economic and social achievements of the recent years.” The president of BHP Billiton China, the diversified minerals and medals sponsor of the 2008 Olympics and the only foreign judge on the panel that approved the design, said, “As one of the judges of the Beijing 2008 Olympics medal design competition, I think the winning design is an image that is both immediately Chinese in form while embodying the traditional style of the Olympic medal.”

Won’t the fragile gemstone break if a medal falls down accidentally, or if an athlete tosses it up in excitement and then fails to catch it? No! But the designers and experts spent months wracking their brains before they could say that. Now they are absolutely sure the jade ring won’t break even if the medal drops from a height of two metres.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has strict stipulations on the materials to be used in the medals, and their weight, size and design. The champion and runner-up in each event are awarded medals made of pure silver. In addition, the champions’ medals have to be plated with at least 6 grams of gold.

“The design meets IOC’s requirements, but also represents the praise and honour the Chinese people want to bestow on the athletes,” Jiang said.

Designed by a team of China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), the medals are seven centimetres in diameter and six millimetres thick. The designers’ attention and expertise was not restricted to the jade rings only, for they have taken even the least detail into consideration. For instance, the hook has been craftily made a part of the whole medal. Its inspiration comes from the hooks in China’s traditional, semi-circular jade jewellery which have a double-dragon design and a patterned grid.

Such was the precision of the CAFA team that its designs got the green light from the solicitation to the approval stage without much of a hitch, though they went on improving their work after each phase.

For the designers, however, the biggest challenge was to ensure that the jade ring in the medals didn’t break easily. That was in October last year. “After a colleague says athletes are in the habit of throwing up the medals in excitement, I began working on how to make jade ‘unbreakable’,” said CAFA professor Wang Yipeng.

“Only two months were left between passing on the design to the manufacturing company and finalizing it,” said Wang, an expert in industrial design. He didn’t realize he had set out on a “mission impossible,” because the academy of fine arts team had experts in metals, mechanics, and non-seismic resistance design.

“But I was depressed after our first meeting. The experts told me it was impossible to prevent jade from breaking, because its rigidity was very different from that of the metals used in the medals. But this was also when I realized we had to collect all the experts’ ideas and find a way to solve the problem ourselves,” he said.

The first month passed in depression and desperation for Wang and his students, because all their four plans ended in failure. “I was under great pressure at the time because less than a month was left for the deadline to expire, and we still had no efficient or workable plan. I shuddered to think what would happen if we failed.”

Then after two weeks of sleepless nights, he found a special material to be put between the jade ring and the metal base to reduce the impact on the gem if a medal was dropped accidentally.

Talking about the next stage, Wang couldn’t hold back his tears just like he couldn’t when “the experiment succeeded just a week before the deadline.”

But Wang is not the only hero of the design success. About 15 CAFA teachers and students formed the core group of the design team that began working in January 2006.

BOCOG launched a global design competition for the medals, inviting 11 professional organizations, including China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, CAFA and Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts & Design. Within three months, 265 proposals were received from 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, the Hong Kong Special Administration Region and more than 10 countries, including the United States, Australia, Russia and Germany.

BOCOG appointed a panel of experts and academics from the fields of arts, sculpture and minting to shortlist the better entries from among the 179 valid submissions. BOCOG approved the CAFA entry as being the best on January 11, 2006, followed by IOC on February 8.