As it is said, it is every athlete's dream to win an Olympic medal, how many of us are aware of the facts that go into making medals? With 10 days to go for the London Olympics to start, here is a look at the surprising facts about medals.

How many of us know how many hours it takes to make a medal? How many people are involved in making such medals for Olympics and what is the percentage of Gold in the actual 'Gold medal' and many more?

The medals are struck five times and then heated to over 1300° F and further pressed for 15 minutes every time with the weight of nearly two million pounds.

If that was not enough, here we give you a few more interesting facts on Olympic medals.

* 800 people were involved in making the medals for London Olympics 2012.

* Supposedly the London Olympics 2012 medals are the heaviest in the history of Summer Olympics.

* The medals are made in Pontyclun, Wales by a company called 'The Royal Mint'. The company is also making special commemorative coins for the games.

* Medals were designed by a British artist David Walkins. He is known for his work on special effects model maker on "Stanley Kubrick's 2011: A Space Odyssey."

* Each medal takes 10 hours to make on a giant press named Colossus. It is considered to be one of the best and was built specially for making these Olympic medals.

* The image on the front of the medal is that of 'Nike', the Greek Goddess of Sport, stepping out of Parthenon to arrive to the host city. It is customary to have it in front of all Olympic medals.

* It is an athlete's dream to get a gold medal at Olympics. How many of us are aware of the percentage of Gold used to make these medals? Actually Gold medal contains very little gold, its indeed made of 92.5% silver and 1.34% Gold with Copper filling in the rest.

However, according to the Olympic committee, it requires 6 grams of Gold to make a medal.

* The ore is truly international and it comes from Copper mine near Salt Lake City, Utah and another in Mongolia.

* Around 4700 medals are made for the Summer Games this year.

Though the Gold medal is not made using Gold alone, it is the most precious one for athletes. Let us hope Indian athletes grab as many as possible this time at the London Olympics that is expected to start next week.

OneIndia News