Historians cannot say exactly when the Olympic champions started biting into their medals. Not in antiquity, anyway. Because with the Greeks, who held the original version of the Games for about 600 years in the holy grove of Olympia for about 600 years from 776 BC, the winners did not receive medals, but olive branches.
The custom must have arisen sometime in the media age, many years after the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, when they had developed from a world sports festival into a visual spectacle. It is said to have emerged from the needs of modern sports photography. David Wallechinsky, President of the Society of Olympic Historians, stated years ago that photographers would at some point have asked the medal winners not to just let their winnings dangle on the ribbon, but to hold them in their hands and between their teeth . The sentence “It has become an obsession for photographers”, which Wallechinsky left the US broadcaster CNN in 2012, is still often quoted.
A German toboggan runner won silver, but lost his tooth filling
Anyway: Now, days after the Olympic Games in Tokyo, medal biting is being discussed for the first time in the context of a greater social outrage. This is a surprise, because every medalist is of course free to bite as much and as hard as they like into the medal they have won. The health risks should be considered, as reported by ex-luge from Sonneberg, David Möller, who bit out a tooth filling on his silver medal after a successful mission in Vancouver in 2010. There is also the unwritten law that you don’t bite other people’s medals – a rule that you don’t need to know to adhere to.
Takashi Kawamura, 72, the mayor of Nagoya City, violated her last week during an appointment with Olympic softball champion Miu Goto. Japan’s Internet citizens are rightly angry, the media report extensively. What happened? Quite simply, Takashi Kawamura had wanted to be funny at the said date, a project that repeatedly leads to embarrassment for many politicians of his age. This time he wanted to let the gold-adorned Goto feel his charm. With gestures he indicated that she should hang his medal on him. In Japan, obedience is part of decency, so Miu Goto followed suit. She also endured the mayor’s weak sayings (“Are you allowed to have romantic relationships?”). She couldn’t prevent Kawamura from taking off his mask and biting into her gold medal for the photographers.
In Japan it doesn’t go down well when people bite into something that doesn’t belong to them
Many psychologists have already explained the biting of a medal by saying that athletes establish a physical relationship with their own achievement in this way. Biting someone else’s medal is an extension of the common vice of adorning yourself with other people’s medals or laurels. It’s no longer enough just to brag, you have to do something to look more amazing than you are. In the case of Mayor Kawamura, however, that went wrong. Especially in times of Corona, it does not go down well in Japan when people bite into something that does not belong to them without being asked.
Miu Goto gets a new medal. The mayor Kawamura pays the costs. He also apologized. And certainly also for his sexist allusions, although he was not really convincing, because he said in his defense: “When I ask young people whether they have a boyfriend or girlfriend, it allows them to relax and more talk.” It could be that Takashi Kawamura doesn’t just have to rethink his relationship with foreign gold medals.