What Are Olympic Medals Made Of? Why Does Every Country Have A Flag?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from VPR. My name is Jane Lindholm, and I host the show. If you've been listening for a while, you already know that we take questions from curious kids around the world, kids just like you, and we find interesting people to help you with some answers.

Just in this past week, we have gotten questions from young listeners in Taiwan, England, Prague in the Czech Republic, New Delhi, India, and lots and lots of states like Montana, Minnesota, Florida, Arizona, Vermont.

Melody, who works on the show with me, and I listen to every single one of your questions. And I wish someone would figure out for me how to make there be more hours in the day or how I could clone myself because we would really love to be able to answer all of your questions in our episodes. But even if we did an episode every day, we wouldn't be able to cover all of your great questions.

So until scientists come up with a way to change the nature of time, we can't answer every single one we get. But please know how much joy it brings us to hear your wonderful voices and your really terrific questions. You are a very curious, connected, and fantastic bunch of kids. This week, we're going to tackle something very timely. As we make this episode, we're in the middle of a global event.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Athletes from around the world are competing against one another in sports like skiing and snowboarding, speed skating, figure skating, biathlon, luge, and bobsled. My favorite named sports in the Winter Olympics are curling and skeleton.

I love watching the Olympics because it's amazing to see athletes who have trained so hard compete on the global stage.

We asked an Olympian to share what it meant to her to win a gold medal at the Games. When the medal hung around my neck and the medal ceremony and the national anthem was playing, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. Hannah Carney is a mogul skier. That means the steep trail she skis down has all these little bumps called moguls. And sometimes the skiers jump into the air and do a flip or a spin before landing and continuing down the mountain as fast as they can.

In the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, Hannah won a gold medal. And I thought, for those few minutes, just about everyone who had helped me get there, because I'm the only one who gets to receive the medal, but there were so many coaches, coaches,

trainers, family members, thanks mom and dad, siblings and friends who helped me achieve what was my ultimate goal, which was to win a gold medal in mogul skiing for the United States of America.

We're going to hear more from Hannah Carney and some other Olympians who are actually in Pyeongchang right now, later in the episode. But let's get to one of your questions. It was actually the Summer Games in 2016 that inspired this curious kid. Hi, my name is Helena. I'm 12 years old and I'm from St. Paul, Minnesota.

My question is, what exactly are Olympic medals made out of? You probably know that there are three medals that get awarded to the top finishers in a race or a game. Gold for first place, silver for second place, and bronze for third place. The Olympic medals are named for the metal they are made out of, and the silver and bronze medals are still made out of, you guessed it, silver and bronze.

But a solid gold medal would be worth a lot of money and way too expensive to make as many as they would need for all the winners at the Olympics. There are 259 sets of gold, silver, and bronze medals for this year's Games. The Olympic Committee says the gold medal is made out of silver, and it's covered with a thin layer of real gold.

The medals themselves are slightly different size depending on whether you win gold or silver or bronze, but they weigh about a pound. The medals are usually round like a coin, but they get redesigned for every Olympic Games, usually by an artist from the country that's hosting the games. This year in South Korea, the front of the medal has the five Olympic rings and lots of diagonal lines that were inspired by Korean trees. They're supposed to look like tree bark, kind of.

On the back of the medal, it says the sport and the event and the official symbol of the 2018 Games. Andrew Weibrecht is another American skier who has won Olympic medals. I have two medals. So one is from the 2010 Vancouver Games, which is a bronze medal. And so that's a little more brown. And that design of that medal was kind of like a wavy, almost looks like maybe like a Pringles potato chip or something like that.

My second medal was a silver medal from Sochi. That's the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. And that is obviously silver. And that medal's design has a bit of crystal in the middle, so it's actually see-through in part of it.

They are not super shiny anymore because I like to share them with everybody that wants to pick them up and hold them. So they've definitely taken a little bit of wear and tear. But, you know, to me it's more special that everybody gets to appreciate and hold an Olympic medal, not just people that win them. And that's more fun from my perspective. You know, probably the biggest surprise everybody has is how heavy they are. They each weigh a couple pounds. So when you pick them up, you're definitely surprised at how much heft there is to them.

Now, the medals are worth some money, something like $600 or less for a gold medal. But athletes will tell you it's not the dollar figure that makes them valuable. But did you know that the U.S. Olympic Committee actually does give a cash prize to Olympic winners? Gold medalists earn $37,000, silver medalists get $22,000, and bronze medalists get $15,000.

That might sound like a lot of money, but it's actually less than most adults make in their jobs in a year. And the Olympics only come around every four years. Now, some athletes can make enough money to support themselves just through their sport, by winning big competitions and by being in advertisements and things like that. But most Olympic athletes have other jobs they do in addition to training for their sport.

So they often have to be really passionate and love their sport to keep doing it. And winning an Olympic medal represents something different to each athlete. Here's how Hannah Carney talks about it. Olympic medals are uniquely designed by each organizing committee. So they're actually just the ultimate souvenir for an Olympic athlete because they represent the spirit, the culture, and the location of the Olympic Games.

On a personal level, they represent all of the hard work that went into attempting to win a medal because a lot of athletes go and don't get one. And I've been on both sides of that equation. So in 2006, I didn't win a medal. In fact, I got third to last. And four years later, that medal, a gold medal and the first for the United States of those Olympic Games, represented ultimate redemption.

And when the medal hung around my neck, it was a huge relief and an ultimate goal achieved, the most satisfying and emotional moment of my life because I thought about everyone who had helped me get there and the years of training that went into that medal, not just the four years in between the Olympic Games. So forever, I will cherish my Olympic medals as a...

representation of my hard work and a memento of the incredible experience I had representing Team USA at three Olympic Games. If you've ever watched any of the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, you might notice that all the athletes from every country get to walk into the Olympic Stadium and get cheered on by crowds of people. And when they walk in, one athlete is in the front of the group holding the national flag of the country they represent.

But why do all the countries have a flag anyway? We'll have an answer to that question next. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm.

One of the joys of the Olympics is seeing all the flags of all the different countries that participate in the games. Maya has a question about that. I am six years old. I live in Middleton, Wisconsin, and my question is, why does every country have a flag? Why does every country have a flag?

Well, we sent that question to Scott Ginter. He teaches college students and he also studies flags. Every country in the world has a flag because flags have become very important, recognized symbols of identity for communities. So when you look up in the air and you see a piece of cloth that

a piece of fabric waving in the breeze, and you say, that stands for my people, that stands for my group, you can feel a real sense of pride.

And when your group comes together with other groups, you might all share a marching of different flags that celebrates the inclusiveness of being together. I'm thinking of the recent Winter Olympic opening ceremonies as an example of flags being used to show identity of different nations coming together.

Flags can also be used when nations come together against each other. And so in a military battle, it would be important to see what flag someone is carrying if you are moving towards them with weapons and they have weapons and they are moving towards you.

The same idea is why flags were used on ships centuries and centuries ago as they moved through waters, so you could look and see what is the identity. Is this a friend or a foe coming towards me?

Flags are used in forts the same way. If we go back thousands and thousands of years, all the way back perhaps to the cave people, people might have been a clan of people that said we are the people of the bear.

The bear might have been important to them, being part of their ecosystem and an animal they saw as strong and powerful. And let's imagine that the religious leader of these people carried the head of the bear around in ceremonies.

Over time, there might have been an artist thousands of years ago who depicted the bear as a symbol on a piece of cloth. And when the skull of the bear had decomposed and it was old, you still had this symbol to carry around.

And so flags evolved over time from something called proto-vexiloids, which are pre-flag symbols that were used to represent group identity for people in ceremonies and rituals.

And we use flags in rituals, which are repeated activities that groups do together to establish and reinforce identity. We might have flag raising, flag salutes, or putting your hand on your heart while you sing an anthem about the flag to the flag.

People use symbols daily in their lives in rituals such as this to reinforce cohesive identity. And this is why flags are so important.

If you'd like to learn more about flags, their history, and their usage, there's a field called vexillology, which is the study of flags. It's a big word, and it comes from the Latin word vexillum, which was the name of the flag symbol, the flag carried in the front of military units for ancient Romans.

Go out and learn about vexillology and continue to study flags because learning about flags leads us to learning about other people and places. And the more we learn about other people around the world and understand them, how they think and what their experiences have been,

the better equipped we are to be thoughtful and caring and participatory citizens of the planet Earth. I've never thought about it that way, that learning about a flag might help us to be better citizens of the planet Earth. What do you feel like your flag represents? Remember I said at the beginning of the show that we've gotten questions just this past week from kids in so many different countries and states?

Each of those countries has a flag, and each of those states has a flag. My tiny hometown in Vermont even has its own flag. And each of your flags are supposed to represent different things about where you live and who you are. We have a fun idea for you. If you had to create a flag that represented you, what would you put on it?

Go ahead, create your own flag and send us a picture of it. We will put it up on the But Why Kids Facebook page. Thanks to Scott Ginter for helping us learn more about flags. He's a professor at San Jose State University in California.

Before we end this episode, we wanted to hear a little bit more about the Olympic experience. We heard earlier from skiers Hannah Carney and Andrew Weibrecht. Hannah decided not to try for the Olympics this time around. But Andrew Weibrecht sent his thoughts from South Korea, where he's competing right now.

He says winning a silver medal in Russia in 2014 felt pretty amazing. It was such an unbelievable experience because I'd been through a lot in the years, especially leading up to Sochi with injuries and things like that, a lot of setbacks that made it that much more special for me. And it kind of showed that

The things that you're able to work through make the successes that much more special and mean that much more. To me, the medals are really just the symbol of all the work that I put in, all the years, from the time that I was 13, 14, 15 years old when I decided that I wanted to be an Olympian and a professional ski racer. Every ounce of

you know, sweat and determination that I put in through those years were kind of, that's what the end manifestation was for me was, was two Olympic medals. And the actual medal itself is just an object, but what it represents is what's really important. And that's, that's really what matters.

Another athlete competing this month in Pyeongchang is a woman named Alana Myers-Taylor. She competes in bobsledding. Have you ever seen a bobsled race? The bobsled is not like what you might use to go down the hill in your backyard. It looks kind of like a giant pill that sits on blades, like skate blades. And inside that pill or tube...

Two or four people crouch down and go down an icy track at high speeds. Ilana is the pilot. That means she sits in front and steers the sled. It's a two-person sled for her race. Ilana sent us a message from Pyeongchang, where she hasn't started racing yet, and she says she's trying not to get too nervous.

Right now, I'm just really trying to stay calm and just enjoy the other events without getting too hyped up. I tend to get a little over-anxious and a little nervous, so in order to stay calm and reserve my energy, I'm just trying to take it all in without doing too much. Alana has won two medals in two different Olympic Games already. She won a bronze medal in 2010 and a silver medal in 2014.

Winning a medal is the most incredible feeling I could ever imagine, aside from marrying my husband. It was such a cool moment to be on the podium and to have a medal draped around your neck and knowing all the hard work and dedication everyone around you and yourself have put into this moment. It's truly incredible. And to do it for your country is...

Awesome. I want to say a big, huge thanks to the Olympians who shared their experiences with us in this episode. Alana Myers-Taylor, Andrew Weibrecht, and Hannah Carney. And good luck to Alana and Andrew in the rest of their games.

And that's it for today. Don't forget to send us the pictures of what your flag would look like. And if you have a question about anything, flags, frogs, or physics, have an adult record it and send it to questions at butwhykids.org. We'll do our best to get an answer for you. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds.

We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode about something most of us don't do enough. Sleep. Until then, stay curious. From PR.