March 1, 2010

Old medals

I absolutely love the design of the Olympic medals at the Vancouver games (just finished, actually enjoyed the hell out of watching about 2/3 of the gold medal game, surprisingly).


The weirdness of the use of the third dimension is just gorgeous, "inspired by the ocean waves, drifting snow and mountainous landscape found in the Games region and throughout Canada."

My appreciation of this year's medals sent me looking for the designs of the past games' medals, and - thanks to yahoo answers - I found a gallery showing every one

I wish that the gallery would show the backs of the medals, because I'm thinking they might have some kind of variety - more than that of the summer medal fronts.  Instead, you just have to click on each one to see the back of that year's medals.

I'm a little disappointed at how boring the summer medal fronts are, but at least some of the backs are a little different.

The winter medals, on the other hand, provided a lot of visual interest.  I particularly love the medals of Torino, Nagano, and Albertville.  Wonder if there's some sort of rule that the summer medals have to look pretty much the same ever Olympiad, 'cause they suck.

5 comments:

calencoriel said...

I'm pretty sure they don't suck if you've earned one...

PHSChemGuy said...

Oh, I'll give you that.

If I had one of my own (as opposed to the dozens that I've bought from ebay), I'd cherish it no matter how plain and ugly it might be.

DanEcht said...

It does look like the summer medals follow the same rubric (excluding the latest). But the winter medals...some of those are gorgeous.

joey said...

was nagano seriously in 1998????

i remember that one like... fairly clearly.

/getting old

PHSChemGuy said...

DanEcht - Yeah, I'm thinking there's some sort of rules for what the summer games have to look like.

Joey - we're all getting old, I tell ya.