Combination of photos taken on January 30, 2024 in Paris showing the medals (silver, gold and bronze, from left to right) of the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games designed by French luxury jewelry house Chaumet and revealed to the public on February 8, 2024 (AFP/Thomas SAMSON)
In gold, silver and bronze, the medals of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games unveiled on Thursday are also “in the Eiffel Tower”, with a hexagonal piece of the Iron Lady set in each of the 5,084 decorations.
On the front side of the medals, an iron hexagon from the Eiffel Tower and bearing the Paris-2024 logo. It emanates rays shaped in the metal of the medal.
On the right side, the engraved figures of the goddess of victory Athena Nike, the Panathenaic stadium and the Acropolis are imposed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) but Paris 2024 has obtained exceptional authorization to add the design of the Eiffel Tower.
The discipline for which the medal is awarded is written on the edge of the medal.
For Paralympic medals, no figures are required for the tails side. It will therefore be a bird’s eye view from below… the Eiffel Tower, with the inscription Paris 2024 in universal braille.
The president of the organizing committee for the Olympic Games, Tony Estanguet, explained on Thursday when unveiling them that the idea of the Eiffel Tower had “reached consensus and imposed itself on us”. He also thanked the Paris town hall and the Eiffel Tower company, headed by the former deputy for sport at the Paris town hall, Jean-François Martins, for telling them that there were “unused pieces of the Tour Eiffel.
– “A piece of France” –
“Bringing back the medal is bringing back a piece of history, but here, bringing back this Olympic medal is bringing back a piece of France, a piece of our heritage,” Martin Fourcade enthused to the press, president of the Cojo athletes’ commission and Olympic champion.
The 18 grams of Eiffel Tower set on each medal were extracted from pieces of the Iron Lady coming from renovations of the monument and secretly kept in hangars in the Paris suburbs.
In the large hall of the organizing committee in Saint-Denis, Antoine Arnault expressed his “very great pride”, describing the object as “a work of art”.
The president of the Organizing Committee for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojo), Tony Estanguet, poses next to the Olympic medals, unveiled in Paris on February 8, 2024. (AFP / Dimitar DILKOFF)
“It’s a historic day, a unique project and the perfect illustration of the ambition that we have given ourselves in this partnership, to be the architect of all victories,” he said, the son of Bernard Arnault , vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Christian Dior SE holding company which controls LVMH.
The luxury group announced its partnership with the Olympics this summer. The jeweler Chaumet, owned by LVMH, was chosen to design the medals which will be manufactured by the Paris mint.
Each will be 85 mm in diameter, 9.2 mm thick, with different weights, 529 g for gold, 525 g for silver and 455 g for bronze.
The weight, size, shape, representations on the obverse of the medals or the ban on drilling the object are imposed by the IOC.
– Make the athlete shine –
“It limits us in our creation but that’s what amuses us,” explains Benoît Verhulle, workshop manager. The creation was carried out in the greatest secrecy since only five people were informed of this “very special order” at Chaumet, underlines Clémentine Massonnat, creative manager.
We had to delve into the archives of the house which has been present for 250 years on Place Vendôme and of which Gustave Eiffel was himself a client. The designers were inspired by wedding or commemorative medals created at the beginning of the 20th century, the radiant appearance of tiaras, specialties of the house, or even hexagonal emeralds from the 50s and 60s.
It was decided to place the piece of the Eiffel Tower “at the center of the medal, to treat it in a hexagonal shape to recall France and to place it at the center of a work of radiation and faceting of the gold to recall the influence of France”, explains Clémentine Massonnat.
The rays and faceting of the medal also allow “the eye to be drawn to this piece of the Eiffel Tower and the medal to reflect the light when the athlete has it around their neck,” she adds. “We had to play with the light (…) when we manipulate or play the light on this medal, the rays catch this light and render it in a completely different way,” explains workshop manager Benoît Verhulle.
“We hope that this will allow the athlete to shine even more in relation to the feat he has achieved,” he says proudly.
Everything must recall Paris down to the smallest detail. Thus the radiance also evokes the City of Lights and the “claw setting” method used for the piece of the Eiffel Tower, with little golden nails at the six vertices of the hexagon, refers to the rivets of the Eiffel Tower.