Years of hard work and sacrifice will pay off as Olympic athletes climb the podium to receive their medals in London. But exactly how are those medals made? The raw materials are mined in the Utah desert in the USA, but that’s just the start of a long and complicated process.
This is the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, it has been dubbed the largest man-made hole in the world, and this is the birthplace of a 2012 Olympic medal.
These massive trucks take the raw materials out of the ground -- and they are massive.
All that earth also only produces 1 medal -- yes 1 medal.
The next process is putting the dirt and earth through a series of grinders.
Once the ore is turned into powder, from there it reacts with a liquid chemical which separates the medal from the dirt.
The medal is actually the bubbles, that gets transferred to a smelter.
From there the copper/silver/or gold sheets -- in this case copper -- are shipped to a factory in Wales to become Olympic medals.