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Baron de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, won a gold medal himself in the poetry event, which he entered anonymously.
Up until 1948, apart from the sporting events there were also ‘artistic’ events in the Olympics which also included ‘town planning, sculpture, music and painting’!!
The oldest person ever to win an Olympic medal was 73-year-old Briton John Copley who won silver in the ‘etchings and engravings event’.
In 1900, a woman won gold for ‘poodle clipping’ - trimming 17 poodles in 2 hours!
The artistic events stopped because of ‘Amateurism’. The people in these events carried on being artists and so on, after the games. While those doing the ‘sport’ had other work to do.
Olympics gold meals are made mostly out of silver (at least 92.5%), with only a tiny amount of gold (6g).
The last ones to be made entirely out of gold were in 1912. If they were made out of 18-carat gold each gold medal would be worth £3,000, which would total up to £1.5 million of the course of the games.
You would bite into a gold coin to check if it was really made out of gold. Fake gold coins normally have lead in them, so if you bite into them you would leave your teeth marks in it. When real gold coins are made, other metals were also added to harden it.
