Bigger, heavier, wider

Pictures of Canadian bronze medallists Emilie Heymans and Jennifer Abel may have left you thinking they have very, very small hands. What they have are very, very big medals: the biggest and heaviest ever at the Oympics Games.

Each host city gets to design its own medals and the 4,700 struck for the London Games are 15 milimetres wider and one milimetre thicker than the medals at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. They weigh between 375 to 400 grams each (depending on the mix of metals).

The gold medals are 92.5 per cent silver (and so are the silver medals). The bronze medals are 97 per cent copper. There is gold in the gold medals, at least six grams of it. That makes them worth $708. If they were solid gold, they'd cost about many millions at today's prices.

The last Games to have 100 per cent gold gold medals was Stockholm in 1912.