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February 21, 2026<\/p>\n
5 min read<\/p>\n
Add Us On Google<\/span>Add SciAm<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Italy promised durable Olympic medals. Science had other plans.<\/p>\n A small design flaw in the medals for the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina turned a durability promise into a very public stress test<\/p>\n By Eric Sullivan edited by Andrea Thompson<\/span><\/p>\n Italy\u2019s state mint designed the Milan Cortina medals to be beautiful, sustainable and durable. Instead of a traditional metal loop soldered to the outside, the ribbon feeds directly into an internal cavity hidden between the two halves of the medal.<\/p>\n Mattia Ozbot\/Getty Images<\/p>\n From skating to curling, the thrilling sports of the Winter Olympics have plenty of science behind them. Follow our coverage here to learn more.<\/p>\n B<\/span>reezy Johnson had just won gold for the U.S. in downhill skiing. Moments after it went around her neck, she jumped up and down\u2014and it broke.<\/p>\n The ribbon attachment snapped clean. She wasn’t alone. A video of U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu\u2019s medal dangling ribbonless made the rounds on social media. German biathlete Justus Strelow watched his bronze clatter to the floor mid-victory-dance on live television.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n What made this particularly awkward was something Giovanni Malag\u00f2, president of the organizing committee for this year\u2019s Winter Olympics, had said at the medal unveiling ceremony in Venice last July: \u201cI can assure you they won’t deteriorate.\u201d The medals were produced by Italy\u2019s own state mint from recycled metals melted in renewable-energy furnaces\u2014a pointed contrast to the 2024 Summer Olympic medals, in Paris, which had developed what some athletes described as a crocodile-skin texture within weeks of the podium. Italy\u2019s would be different. Italy\u2019s would last.<\/p>\n Then Breezy Johnson jumped.<\/p>\n The organizing committee launched an investigation with the state mint. Within days, they announced a fix. They have not said what it was.<\/p>\n To understand what happened, it helps to talk nerdy metallurgy.<\/p>\n The medals feature an asymmetric design with two parts\u2014one smooth, one textured\u2014that are meant to fit together to represent the city of Milan and the town of Cortina d\u2019Ampezzo, respectively urban and alpine. It\u2019s the whole aesthetic concept of the Games compressed into about 500 grams of recycled metal. Per International Olympic Committee rules, \u201cgold\u201d medals are mostly silver\u2014at least 92.5 percent\u2014with a thin gold plating; silver medals are the same silver without the gilding. Bronze medals are mostly copper.<\/p>\n They\u2019re beautiful objects. Rather than hanging from a traditional metal loop soldered to the outside, the ribbon feeds directly into an internal cavity hidden between the medal’s two halves. The setup relies on a breakaway safety clasp, a small mechanism engineered to pop open under force to prevent strangulation, like the badge lanyards at any conference. It was a sound idea, but the execution didn\u2019t hold up.<\/p>\n Laura Bartlett, an associate professor of metallurgical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, says the primary failure could be as simple as an undersize part or a weak joint. \u201cMaybe the section size was too small for the weight of the metal that it was supposed to support,\u201d she says. In other words, the cross section may have been too skinny for a heavy medal. If the clasp was soldered or welded to the heavy silver body, contamination from the air could have introduced invisible weaknesses. \u201cIf you end up with a defect, like hydrogen porosity, for example, that is a defect that can bring the strength down at the joint area,\u201d Bartlett says. (Think tiny bubbles trapped right where you need strength most.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to blame the subfreezing mountain air for the breakages, but the metallurgy doesn\u2019t back that up. When athletes reported their dropped medals denting or chipping, some speculated the cold had made the hardware brittle. Silver and gold, however, lack a ductile-to-brittle transformation point. \u201cThey\u2019re just as ductile at room temperature, typically, as they are at negative five degrees Celsius,\u201d Bartlett says.<\/p>\n Ductile doesn\u2019t mean indestructible, though. \u201cIt\u2019s quite ductile material, but it\u2019s not very strong,\u201d Bartlett says. \u201cSilver or gold are pretty weak, and so, if you do drop it, you\u2019re going to dent it no matter what.\u201d A true crack\u2014rather than a dent from a hard fall\u2014would be much stranger, pointing to a preexisting casting defect, such as a \u201chot tear,\u201d where internal stresses build up as the metal cools in its mold.<\/p>\n That mold is part of an intricate manufacturing process. To achieve the medal\u2019s high level of aesthetic detail, Bartlett suspects the mint used investment casting\u2014the kind of process you pick when you want crisp edges and fine surface detail. You start with a wax pattern, build a ceramic shell around it in repeated dips, burn out the wax and then pour molten metal into the cavity. Because the ceramic slurry is so fine\u2014\u201clike flour,\u201d Bartlett says\u2014it can capture details that other methods can\u2019t.<\/p>\n U.S. skier Breezy Johnson celebrates her Olympic gold medal win on February 8, soon before a design flaw caused it to detach from its ribbon.<\/p>\n Luo Yunfei\/China News Service\/VCG via Getty Images<\/p>\n You might assume the metal poured into that shell was the culprit because the mint proudly used recycled production waste rather than virgin silver. But Bartlett says we can cross that off the list of suspects, too. \u201cMost foundries that melt and cast these types of metals, they start with a scrap mix,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can refine it and turn even scrap into something that has just as good of properties as the original virgin metal.\u201d Bartlett also notes that induction melting\u2014the method the mint described using\u2014is a very common, flexible way to melt metal, especially when scrap is part of the feedstock.<\/p>\n If the material is sound and the cold isn\u2019t to blame, the problem likely loops right back to the original design of the hardware. Host cities have always wrestled with the gap between a beautiful concept and a functional object, and the ribbon attachment has been a persistent headache for decades. Olympic medals weren\u2019t designed to be worn around the neck until 1960, when a laurel-leaf chain was introduced in Rome, and subsequently ribbons became standard. The shift to a ribbon-hung design introduced an engineering problem that no two Games have solved the same way, and they have solved it with varying success. The medals in the Turin 2006 Games bypassed the issue entirely by featuring a large hole at the center of the medal itself, with the ribbon elegantly threaded through the middle.<\/p>\n For its part, Paris 2024\u2019s problem was chemical, not structural; athletes at the time complained that some medals discolored and flaked within weeks. The French mint reformulated its protective varnish after the European Union restricted chromium trioxide, a toxic chemical previously used to prevent corrosion. The replacement didn’t hold up, leaving copper-rich bronze particularly vulnerable to oxidation and turning some medals blotchy and uneven.<\/p>\n As medal designs have grown more ambitious, the physical demands have grown with them. A recycled-alloy medal with an asymmetric shape and a precision breakaway clasp, headed for subfreezing mountain air, is a much harder engineering problem than a stamped disk on a ribbon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 21, 2026 5 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Italy promised durable Olympic medals. Science had other plans. A small design flaw in the medals for the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina turned a durability promise into a very public stress test By Eric Sullivan edited by Andrea Thompson Italy\u2019s state mint<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[10845,1039,23243,7719,7138,8310],"class_list":{"0":"post-44979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-broke","9":"tag-failure","10":"tag-medals","11":"tag-olympic","12":"tag-revealed","13":"tag-winter"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n