![]() ![]() Because it is weirdly divorced from its history, because it doesn’t make any real sense, and because so many do not get medals, the photo is appealing to photographers because it’s truly an icon of the Olympics. The medal bite is our chance to see winners as people again.įinally, it lets us see a uniquely Olympian moment. You don’t see their personality during the events, because personality doesn’t win competitions. When we see them biting their medal, we get to see them as themselves again (albeit more jubilant than they might ever have been). During the competition, they’re necessarily focused-zeroed in, tuning out the world. The bite image is not only the true end of the win cycle, it’s the time when we see the Olympian as themselves again. ![]() First, there’s the moment the athlete surpasses the previous time, or gains an impassable lead, or earns an unbeatable score then, there’s the actual end of the event, when the winner is declared. Think of how many times we know the result of an event before the bite image. It’s the last part of the process, and seeing it cements the Olympian’s win in our minds. And like most icons, its literal meaning is an extremely distant second to its symbolic import.īiting a medal is an icon of completion. It’s a complex image (person, medal, action, background), but it serves an icon with a clear meaning. It’s visual storytelling at its most transparent. So, what’s going on here? Why is biting a medal “a thing”-one so entrenched in the games that photographers demand it? Burad details their composition as being “silver and plated with 6g of gold.” So there’s no reason to bite, unless an athlete wants to reaffirm that their gold medal is far more a symbol of accomplishment than a material reward.Īnd biting silver and bronze? Well, that doesn’t even make the anachronistic/joking sense of biting gold, and as Ryan Lochte learned by chipping a tooth on a silver medal in 2010, it’s not something to do with gusto. Purity-wise, gold medals are exactly what merchants were afraid of when they bit their pieces before accepting them: they’re barely gold at all. Do Olympians really question the purity of their gold medals? And why do they bite non-gold medals too? If the piece took a small bitemark but quickly stopped the teeth, merchants knew it was only coated in gold-and that the majority was a harder, less valuable metal. Gold, softer than human teeth, would show a bitemark if it was pure. It’s a great answer, but it smuggles in another question: why is it an iconic shot that seems saleable?ĭinesh Burad puts some context behind the ‘why’ of medal-biting, reminding us that the practice of biting gold began long ago as a test of purity. I don’t think it’s something the athletes would probably do on their own,” Wallechinsky concludes. ![]() “I think they look at it as an iconic shot, as something that you can probably sell. This might be reasonable, considering their answer makes more sense in the visual storytelling of the Olympics and worldwide celebration as a whole: “It’s become an obsession with the photographers,” the network quotes David Wallechinsky. Visuals have similar long-running tropes that no longer have a clear tie to their origins, and during the Tokyo Olympics, we’re looking today at an image that fits this description perfectly: Olympians biting their medals.ĬNN and other sources have lately asked the same question, though CNN showed little interest in the historical origins of the idea. “That’s the ticket,” “put your foot in your mouth,” “bite the bullet”-researching the meanings and origins of these and others can sometimes provide surprising revelations. In conversation, we regularly use expressions without really knowing their origins. ![]()
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