Actual weight of olympic medals
The Olympic Games in Paris bring back a question as old as time: should all medals be worth the same? We all know that medals are big and shiny so that those who wear them can warn other people that they are way better than others in some disciplines.
But when a medal is won by an athlete that also has won in other disciplines, does that medal provide the same amount of information? No, and since information is the reason why medals exist, some medals should be given less weight. And I mean physically remove part of the metal they are made of.
In this image I show how big a hole we should make in some medals.
The code can be found here, and an interactive notebook can be found on Google Colab here.
p.s. Out of all the pairs of disciplines that share only one medalist, the most interesting one is 4x100 freestyle relay and women’s handball, both disciplines in which Roswitha Krause won medals.