vancouver, british columbia | Many months before any athletic competition was held at the 2010 Winter Olympics, another contest was held to determine which artist would design the 882 medals give to the victors.
The winner was Jerusalem-born Omer Arbel.
“It’s a great honor,” Arbel said in a recent interview. “It’s something I don’t think will even happen again in my life.”
Arbel, an architect and industrial designer in the Vancouver area, submitted his design proposal nearly two years ago.
His work generally focuses on making large-scale compositions and mass-produced objects unique so that they are valued, rather than seen as uniform and disposable. While Olympic medals hardly suffer for not being valued, it was important to Arbel that each one be individual and original in the context of a cohesive theme.
“Each athlete’s story is unique, but each athlete is connected to each through a larger Olympic ideal,” he explained.
Arbel, 33, said he considers his roots and his connection to Israel important, but they don’t define his work.
“[Hebrew] is my first language. When I dream, that’s the language that my dreams are,” said Arbel, who moved to Canada with his parents at age 13. But he added that his work “transcends language and place.”
While being Israeli “is a big part of my background and identity,” he stressed, “I’m a combination of many different things, one of which is Israeli.”
Arbel’s finished product is a medal with an undulating surface that reflects the topography of British Columbia. Super-imposed on it is a piece of artwork by local aboriginal artist Corinne Hunt, another finalist in the design competition.
At 6 ounces each, the medals are among the heaviest in Olympic history. But the gold medals are not solid gold.
The gold medal is gold-plated over silver, and its metals are worth $500. The sterling silver metal in the silver medal is worth $250 and the bronze medal — which is actually copper to give it a more distinctive, less yellow, color — is worth $50.
But according to Dan Mallett, who managed the medals project for the Royal Canadian Mint, the value of each medallion must take into account the many hours of labor and creative costs, pushing their cost up to $4,000 to $5,000 apiece.
Though, Mallett adds, truly “they’re priceless.”
Arbel’s efforts have been rewarded by an overwhelming response, as some 6,000 people per day have been lining up for as much as four hours to see (and hold) the medals at a temporary Royal Mint outpost in downtown Vancouver.
Arbel said the medals have no country designation on them — they are instead distinguished by the engraved name of the sport and the etched fragment of Hunt’s artwork.
“It’s pretty powerful to see them,” Arbel said of watching his creation handed out at medal ceremonies. “It’s pretty powerful to see them around people’s necks.”