Olympic athletes who bite their gold medals on the podium are participating in a completely pointless tradition based on an obsolete economic counterfeit test from centuries ago.

A closer look

Olympic athletes who bite their gold medals on the podium are participating in a completely pointless tradition based on an obsolete economic counterfeit test from centuries ago. Historically, merchants would bite down on a gold coin to verify its authenticity, since pure gold is a relatively soft metal and human teeth would leave a slight indentation, whereas cheaper fake metals like iron would just break your jaw. Today, Olympic gold medals are overwhelmingly made of silver and simply coated in a microscopic layer of actual gold, making the bite test scientifically meaningless and genuinely terrible for dental health. Furthermore, we abandoned the gold standard decades ago, so precious metals have almost zero bearing on our actual modern economic system anyway. Photographers just keep aggressively screaming at athletes to bite the medals because it makes for a quirky front-page photo, entirely detached from the grim realities of medieval monetary fraud