Asian Games Champions Are Sealing Their Worn Gold Medals in Plastic
Nagoya's Asian Games gold medals are wearing out days after the Games: karate champion Li Qiaoqiao says hers scuffed on the podium and wore further as well-wishers handled it, so she sealed it in plastic film — and her teammates' medals are flaking on the back too.
Li Qiaoqiao's Asian Games gold medal began wearing out almost as soon as she left the Nagoya podium. The two-time Asian Games karate champion told China News Service she noticed scuffing the moment the ceremony ended — and that the well-wishers who lined up to handle the medal after she brought it home wore it down further. Her response has become the story's emblem: she sealed the medal in plastic film. Her teammates' medals, she said, are wearing through on the back too.
The observation trended within days as 'the Asian Games champions' gold medals are already worn smooth,' and the details that surfaced went beyond one athlete's keepsake. According to widely shared posts, at least one esports gold medalist had a medal replaced overnight by the manufacturer over discoloration along its edge; the organizing committee has logged four medal-replacement requests in all.
Part of the explanation is chemistry. Like most major games, Nagoya's roughly 7,000 medals are silver gilt rather than solid gold — plating over a harder core, a standard chosen because pure gold is too soft to survive a podium, let alone a victory ceremony. Seventeen-year-old sprinter Chen Yujie put the gap between ideal and material in a line quoted all week: the medal is '999 fine gold in name, maybe old-iron 666 in practice' — swapping a gold-purity grade for Chinese internet slang that is at once a joke about cheap metal and a cheer.
What rankles is not the metal but the wear rate. The comparisons arriving in the same threads reach back to 2008, when Beijing's Olympic medals were remembered as the kind that survived fire and drops. Whether Nagoya's gilding was too thin or its base metal too soft is the question the film-wrapped medals now put to the manufacturer.
For the athletes the arithmetic is simpler. A medal is the one object of a four-year cycle meant to be handled — by family, by neighbors, by the whole village that turned out when Li came home. Hers now lives under plastic, and the committee's four replacement requests are, so far, the only answer to whether that will be standard equipment for Nagoya's champions.