Picture it – you’re watching the 2024 Paris Olympics as the athletes take to the podium to collect their medals.
The national anthem for the gold medallist plays. And soon after, they’re posing for pictures while biting the precious object they’ve spent years honing their craft to win.
It’s one of the more strange phenomena in modern sport, but is something that you see stars do across their disciplines.
From the Olympics to winning the Premier League or FA Cup, athletes often take a chomp down on what is one of the most precious things they could ever get their hands on as professionals in their field.
Tennis stars have also been seen to do it with their winnings.
In the UK, Great Britain’s 1991 win in the 4x100m relay at the World Championships was among the first noticed moments where winning athletes did this.
All four winners – Derek Redmond, John Regis, Roger Black and Kriss Akabusi – posed with their golds between their teeth during the tournament in Tokyo.
More recent legends to have done the same include the fastest man on Earth, Usain Bolt, and the greatest swimmer of all time, Michael Phelps.
Usain Bolt biting one his golds in the 2016 Games (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
Team GB icon Tom Daley also did similar after winning his first gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Games alongside teammate Matty Lee in the 10 metres synchronised platform diving.
Even the Tokyo Olympics referenced medal-biting in a tweet, which said their medals were not ‘edible’ due to being made from ‘material recycled from electronic devices donated by the Japanese public’, however, they added: “So, you don’t have to bite them… but we know you still will.”
Back in 2012, David Wallechinsky, President of the International Society of Olympic Historians, spoke to CNN about the phenomenon and why athletes do it in the first place.
And from the sounds of it, it’s more of a gimmick that is asked of athletes once they’ve been handed the goods by tournament officials.
Jude Bellingham doing it after winning the Champions League (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
“It’s become an obsession with the photographers,” Wallechinsky said.
“I think they look at it as an iconic shot, as something that you can probably sell.
“I don’t think it’s something the athletes would probably do on their own.”
At this point, given it has been a trend for decades, one psychologist believes we do it because, well, that’s what winning Olympians do.
“Sports all have their eccentricities,” said Frank Farley, a professor from Temple University in Philadelphia and former president of the American Psychological Association.
“If you want to be part of the winning zeitgeist, that winning culture, you participate in that winning practice.
Bahamas gold medallist Shaunae Miller-Uibo bites her medal in the 2020 Games (INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)
“It makes your medal yours. It’s an emotional connection with your accomplishment.”
It does come with a risk, though.
Back in the 2010, Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, German luger David Moeller snapped one of his teeth doing the pose for photographers at the Games.
“The photographers wanted a picture of me holding the medal just with my teeth,” Moeller told German newspaper Bild.
“Later at dinner, I noticed a bit of one of my teeth was missing.”
Ouch.
