Some facts you may not know about the Olympics [video]

The Winter Olympics are starting today and AsapSCIENCE's YouTube channel has created a special video showing some curiosities about the medals and winners of both the traditional and the Winter Olympics.

For example, did you know that the gold medal is actually silver? What sets it apart from the second place medal is that the first one is bathed in at least six grams of pure gold. In fact, it was in 1912 that the last solid gold medal was awarded. Already the current bronze medal is made of a metal alloy composed mainly of copper, having a value of only four dollars.

Check out the video, which is in English, with more curiosities like these.

Another interesting fact is that this year, at the Russian Winter Olympics, whoever takes first place in February 15 competitions will win a cosmic gold medal! That's right! Each medal will have a fragment of the meteorite that hit the country exactly one year ago in Chelyabinsk.

But did you know that not always the first places received gold medal? At the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the first place winners received silver medals along with an olive branch. Already the runner-up won a bronze medal, and the third place received nothing but congratulations.

Another curiosity is about China, which also received nothing at the Olympic Games for a long time, and its first Olympic medal came in 1984.

Doping and statistics

The AsapSCIENCE video also explains the origin of the word gym, which comes from the Greek "gymnos" meaning "nude". So in the old games the Greeks competed completely naked - just imagine!

The first official Winter Olympics took place in Chamonix, France, in 1924. In the 1936 edition, the games were first broadcast on TV. Held in Berlin, Germany during the Nazi regime, the games were shown in somewhat hazy black-and-white images, but were once a success to replace conventional radio coverage.

The video also tells you which youngest and oldest winner has ever won an Olympic Games competition. The youngest was Dimitrios Lewd Russ, who was awarded the bronze medal in 10-year-old gymnastics. The oldest was Oscar Swan, who won a silver medal in shooting at the age of 72.

The debut of snowboarding at an Olympic event took place at the 1998 Nagano Games, and there was a controversy involving doping with Canadian Ross Rebagliati, who won the gold medal but lost it the next day as it was found that there was evidence of THC in your blood. Today Ross is still in the business and has a business for the medical use of cannabis, a coffee called Ross's Gold.

Finally, the video shows the significance of the Olympic colors. The five interconnected hoops on a white background, in the colors blue, yellow, black, green and red, represent the union of the five continents.