08 Feb The 2024 Paris Olympic medals have a piece of the Eiffel Tower in them
When medalists return home after competing in the Olympics this summer in Paris, they’ll bring a piece of the city back with them. Embedded in the medals for the 2024 Games is a piece of the Eiffel Tower.
Organizers said “bonjour” this week to the 2024 Games medals at a press conference. As is standard for recent summer medals, the obverse side shows the goddess of victory Nike at Panathinaikos Stadium, the site of the first modern Olympic Games, but Paris designers added a new detail with the Eiffel Tower depicted in the distance. The reverse side shows the Paris 2024 logo inside a piece of the tower shaped as a hexagon, evoking the tower’s shape as viewed from underneath.
“Our starting point was really to think about the athletes and what could be the most iconic thing that they could have?” Paris 2024 head of design, Joachim Roncin, tells Fast Company. The 984-foot tower, designed by French engineer Gustave Eiffel to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889, was an obvious choice.
The pieces of the Eiffel Tower used in the medals had been removed during renovation work and were sourced from Société d’Exploitation de la tour Eiffel, which manages the tower. Roncin says the pieces and cleaned and burnished. Stripped of “Eiffel Tower brown” paint, the metal is restored to its original color.
The medals will be the first in Olympic history designed by jewelers. A creative team from Chaumet, a Paris-based jewelry and watch house owned by the French luxury giant LVMH group, designed the medals, with details like a “claw setting” used in its high-end jewelry to attached the metal hexagon. The medal ribbon shows detail of the Eiffel Tower crosspieces.
“It’s very simple and this what we wanted, something very simple, something very sharp and minimalistic, but it’s a matter of thousands of details,” Roncin says.
It makes sense organizers would opt for medals designed as jewelry in France, where haute couture fashion is governed by law, and luxury and artisans and brands are a point of national pride. The goal, Roncin says, was to design something that no one else could do.
“It’s only Paris that could have this,” he says. “Exceptional.”
Source: Fast Company
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