Why are athletes always biting their gold medals?
Theoretically to test their purity, but probably because everybody else is doing it. In their pure forms, gold and silver are actually “soft” enough to make tooth marks. In principle, you could use the “bite test” to see if a medal were pure, 24-karat gold. Of course, the Olympic gold medal isn’t pure gold anyway. So Olympians can’t really test the purity of the medal without a lot of practice. (For more on why athletes nibble their medals, read this Explainer from 2006.) Beijing Olympics officials established a gender determination lab in July to investigate whether some suspect female athletes are actually men. Is a “gender test” as simple as it sounds? No. You can’t tell just by looking at genitalia because a person’s anatomy might not match their chromosomes. But you can’t simply count the X chromosomes, because some women have only one X and some biological males are XXY. Today the International Olympic Committee relies on a panel of specialists to account for all these ambiguitie
