Podium finishers at the upcoming Paris Olympics will be rewarded with a piece of the Eiffel Tower, organisers said on Thursday, unveiling the event’s medals which are set with hexagon-shaped tokens forged out of scrap metal from the monument.

The idea was to link the Games with symbols of France, said Thierry Reboul, creative director of Paris 2024. “The absolute symbol of Paris and France is the Eiffel Tower,” Reboul told reporters. “It’s the opportunity for the athletes to bring back a piece of Paris with them.”

Designed by jeweller Chaumet, the 18-gram hexagon tokens, representing the shape of France, are made of iron taken from the Tower during past refurbishments and then stored for years in a warehouse whose location is secret.

They sit in the centre of the gold, silver and bronze medals, ringed with grooves evoking light rays bursting outward — drawn from a tiara design in Chaumet’s
archives.

The back of the medals features the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, charging forward, with the Acropolis to one side and the Eiffel Tower to the other.

Paralympics medals feature a view of the Eiffel Tower from underneath, and are stamped with Paris 2024 in Braille — homage to the Frenchman who invented it.

The 5,084 medals are produced by France’s mint, the Monnaie de Paris.

“We want to make sure those pieces of Eiffel Tower stay at home,” French wheelchair tennis player Pauline Deroulede told reporters.

The 330-metre-tall tower is made of 18,038 iron parts. Built for the 1889 World’s Fair — which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution — engineer Gustave Eiffel’s tower was only intended to stand for 20 years.

Instead, it just goes on and on — thanks to a bit of rejuvenating surgery from time to time and constant care. The 135-year-old tower is a veteran of two previous Games — in 1900 and 1924, the last held in Paris.

Olympic medals have tended to be quite sober. In what was a first, medals for the 2008 Beijing Olympics contained inlaid jade disks. But Paris is the only host city to include chunks of a famous monument.

The gold medals weigh 529 grams and are not pure gold. They are made of silver and plated with 6 grams of gold. The silvers weigh 525 grams. The bronzes weigh
455 grams and are a copper, tin and zinc alloy.