Designing Olympic Glory on Metal

Brent Watts’ design firm has created packaging for Hot Wheels, marketed the Muppets and built a massive Fifth Avenue window display for the upcoming “Cat in the Hat” movie.

But this week, the Pasadena company’s tiniest creation--measuring 4 inches high and 3.25 inches wide--will attract worldwide attention. A design cast in gold, silver and bronze will be Watts’ legacy: the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic medal.

Designing an Olympic medal requires distilling all the symbolism of the games into one inanimate object. A medal must capture the pursuit of athletic excellence. It must allude to the theme and setting of the games. And it must do it all in a space no bigger than the palm of your hand.

But the challenge--and reward--of an Olympic commission is the chance for an artisan to create something for the ages. “In this business,” Watts said, “it’s all about what resonates the longest.”

Creating an Olympic medal is a time-consuming, painstaking process. What began in mid-2000 with an invitation to participate in a design competition and a few rough ideas in Watts’ sketchbook has for the last year taken a team of artists, a sculptor, a die-cutter, an engraver and a 1,000-ton metal press to produce. The finished medals--which weigh slightly more than a pound each--will be on view when the games begin Friday.

In ancient times, Olympians were awarded an olive wreath, a prize that was instituted at the suggestion of the Oracle at Delphi. But since the start of the modern games in 1896, medals--often created by local artisans--have been given out in gold, silver and bronze.

The International Olympic Committee has strict rules governing the design of medals for the Summer Games, but organizers of the Winter Games have always had free reign over the look and content of their medals. Winter Olympic medals have in the past been square, colored and even made of stone and crystal.

Reflecting Utah’s Beauty

In Salt Lake City, Organizing Committee members had a clear idea of what they wanted their medals to be, said Chairman Mitt Romney. They wanted something that would be rendered completely in metal--in part because O.C. Tanner, a Utah company that makes employee recognition products and is a sponsor of the games, already had been chosen to craft the medals.

They wanted something that would reflect Utah’s natural beauty, either in shape or design. And they wanted something distinctive. A proposal submitted by one of the 100 competitors in the design competition was rejected because its pine-cone decorations were too reminiscent of the 1992 Albertville, France, medal.

In addition, said Romney, “I wanted something that was art and not just beautiful graphic work. Something that connected with the theme of our games--’Light the fire within’--that showed how these athletes overcome the challenges of the snow and ice in mountain venues to achieve their dreams and inspire others. There’s a metaphor in what they do, and I was looking for a metaphor.”

Watts, president of Axiom Designed Communications, said he usually avoids entering competitions. But to Watts, a native of Utah, this one was different.

“We looked at what this assignment means, what it means for an athlete to receive a medal,” Watts said recently at Axiom’s airy Pasadena studio. “The victory medal must represent certain things. We looked at the history of athletes in competition. And we looked at the historical products of the medals that had been previously awarded.”

Inspired by Sculptures

Watts studied pictures of Native American jewelry, rugs and blankets. He admired the organic shapes of Eskimo art. He drew inspiration from classic representations of the athlete as victor, such as those found on Greek urns. On a family vacation in Warsaw, he bought three Communist-era medals in an antique store that ultimately helped him choose a weathered patina for the 2002 medals.

And, perhaps most important, Watts stared long and hard at Michelangelo’s series of “slave” sculptures, originally conceived for the tomb of Pope Julius II in the early 1500s. The statues, which appear to be unfinished, depict figures seemingly emerging from their still roughhewn marble blocks.

Michelangelo once described the art of sculpting as liberating the figure imprisoned in the marble. And the Axiom-designed medal echoes that sentiment.

The front of the medal is a direct descendant of those slave statues, which many have argued were purposely given an incomplete look. A central figure, torch in hand, seems to be emerging from the medal, breaking free of the rock or ice that serves as a backdrop.

“We wanted the content to be about this forging forward, this emerging from,” said Watts. “We all came west, we conquered and forged, and so a representation of that was appropriate.”

For the reverse of the medal, Romney asked Axiom to use another design that the firm had submitted--an almost gender-neutral rendering of Nike, goddess of victory, her hand cupped around the circumference of the medal. Originally, she breathed frost onto the face of the medal, but IOC members raised a fear that the frost would be mistaken for smoke.

Nike, everyone quickly agreed, could not be caught with a cigarette.

And so, in the final version of the medal, Nike clasps an olive leaf in her hand, an homage to the ancient games. Behind her, depending on which sport the medal is awarded in, will be one of 15 different scenes, from ice rinks to ski slopes.

Watts, Romney and the Salt Lake Olympic Committee agreed on the 15 settings after talking to a focus group of Olympians about what they liked and disliked about their medals from past games. It became clear that figure skaters viewed their sport differently from those who compete in the biathlon.

“They said it would be an Olympian’s dream that his or her sport was featured on the medal somehow,” said Romney. “To engrave the name of the sport on a medal, as we do, is not new. But to have a sculpted depiction of the sport, that’s a first.”

Medal’s Shape Is Organic

There are many things that make the 2002 medal unique. It is wider, thicker and heavier than any before it. All of the precious metals, including the 6 grams of gold used in each gold medal (the rest is mostly silver), were mined in Utah.

And then there’s the shape of the medal, a not-quite-perfect circle. This organic form, said Romney, makes the medal look as if it “had been taken from a Utah river.”

“We didn’t want to specifically show the mountainous West,” said Watts, “but we wanted to allude to it.”

To craft such a shape, the medals were pressed with 2 million pounds of pressure and then finished by hand. Each medal took about 20 hours to create.

In all, 861 medals were produced for the 2002 games. At least 477 will be awarded during the Olympics; the rest were made in case of ties and for the IOC to archive at its museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The fact that so few medals will be awarded, said Jim Greensfelder, coauthor of “Olympic Medals: A Reference Guide,” makes them incredibly collectible. Although participation medals--smaller medallions awarded to all who compete in Olympic games--have been sold and traded for years, the buying and selling of prize medals is a recent phenomenon.

“For collectors,” said Greensfelder, “rarity is more important than beauty.”

“More than anything else,” said Mike Paganos, the founder of Coubertin.com, an online Olympic collectors’ auction, “the fact that they are Olympic medals makes them desirable and valuable.”

When Olympic medals do appear at auction, they usually have little information about the athlete who won them. (Most are from team sports, in which many awards are given out for a single event.) But many Olympic collectors said that most medals they see at auction are sold by athletes in the former Soviet republics.

Still, even without a clear provenance, prize medals have fetched between $3,000 and $7,000 apiece at recent auctions. A gold medal from the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games, awarded in baseball, sold last week on EBay for $3,100.

“The demand for these medals,” Paganos said, “has markedly increased in the last five years. I believe the potential for dramatic appreciation is now there.”

When asked which medal he covets, Paganos replied that he likes “the more unusual medals, because many of the medals have similar or very plain designs.” He cited the medal for the 1998 Nagano Winter Games as among his favorites. “It has a wonderful texture. It is a ‘touchy- feely’ medal very different from any other.”

The Nagano medal, which highlights several Japanese arts, including cloisonne and makie, a technique for applying gold and silver powder to a lacquered surface, is the most recent example of how medals attempt to evoke the host country or region. The 1972 Sapporo, Japan, medal, the first square design, depicted a ski trail reminiscent of a Zen garden. The medal for the 1994 Lillehammer games contained sparagmite, a Norwegian stone extracted from a site that became the Olympic ski jump.

And the medal for the 1992 games in Albertville, manufactured by Lalique, was almost entirely crystal set in gold, silver and bronze. That medal, said Olympic collector Craig Perlow, has rarely appeared at auction.

“That’s probably because it’s fairly recent, but also because the people fortunate enough to be awarded them want to hold on to them,” he said. “It’s a beautiful medal.”

An Olympic medal, Perlow said, exudes a unique power.

“To me, there is nothing more important than being able to capture that moment in time,” he said.

“The place where it was won was part of it. The event is a part of it. But it’s that moment in time--a unique and singularly important one--that that medal freezes forever.”