Paris Olympics medals fashioned by luxury jeweller are falling apart, but why?


By AGENCY

Photos provided by Nick Itkin, a US Olympic foil fencer, shows the deteriorating bronze medal that he won at the 2024 Paris Olympics. The Olympic medals were designed by Chaumet, a luxury jewellery and watch maker, part of the LVMH group. Photo: The New York Times

Rarely in Olympic history had a single company been as ubiquitous as LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods empire owned by France’s richest family.

As the Paris Olympics’ biggest corporate sponsor, LVMH was everywhere.

Its Moet & Chandon champagne flowed in VIP suites. French athletes were clothed by LVMH’s Berluti fashion house. And, in contravention of at least the spirit of the Olympic Charter, Louis Vuitton luggage was trotted out during the opening ceremony and seen by more than one billion people worldwide.

But its most significant role involved the Olympic medals, which were designed by Chaumet, a luxury jewellery and watch maker and part of the LVMH group.

Gold, silver and bronze – the very best athletes would take them back home as mementos of their feats at the Paris Games.

Now those medals are falling apart – and LVMH has fallen silent.

In just over 100 days since the Olympics closed, more than 100 athletes have asked for their crumbling medals to be replaced. Last month, Clement Secchi and Yohann Ndoye-Brouard, French swimmers, showed their flaking medals on social media.

“Crocodile skin,” Secchi wrote.

Nick Itkin, a US Olympic foil fencer, said his bronze medal started to deteriorate a few days after the Olympics.

“But after like a few weeks, it got more noticeable,” he said, adding that he planned to ask for a replacement.

Read more: How one fashion conglomerate seemingly inserted itself into the Olympics

Medals have had to be replaced in other Olympics – notably in Rio De Janeiro in 2016. But in no previous Olympics has a company stamped its brand credentials so prominently.

The issue seems to be most acute with the bronze medals, problems for which athletes first started flagging shortly after receiving them.

The International Olympic Committee has apologised and says it will find replacements. Monnaie De Paris, the French mint, which produced the medals, has so far taken responsibility, blaming the problem on a technical issue related to varnish.

And LVMH has been happy to let the other organisations do the talking. A spokesperson for the company said because it did not make the medals and is not responsible for them, LVMH has no comment.

But in the buildup to the Olympic Games, and during the event itself, LVMH was showing off the roles of its expert artisans in crafting the medals.

On the second floor of a club it created, just a few yards from the Elysee Palace, the residence of the French president, designers from Chaumet proudly explained the yearlong project to design the medals in secrecy. At the heart of each was a piece of the Eiffel Tower.

Chaumet had never previously designed a sporting medal, and of the three they were asked to make, the bronze was the trickiest.

“It’s the most difficult because it’s the most delicate,” Philippe Bergamini, one of Chaumet’s longest serving jewellery designers, said at the time.

The company tweaked the designs hundreds of times until a special committee of athletes and Olympic officials were in agreement. Designers then joined forces with the mint, a French institution that has produced money and other precious objects since the Middle Ages.

Each medal took 15 days to complete, from stamping out the design to dipping it in gold, bronze and silver and then finishing it with a coat of varnish.

So when one athlete posted photos of his bronze medal rusting last August, just weeks after the Games, the mint began an internal inquiry to “understand the circumstances and cause of the damage”, the organisation said in a statement.

The mint discovered that the varnish used to prevent oxidation was defective.

Its varnish recipe is a trade secret, but the coating was weakened after the mint changed it to conform to recent European Union regulations banning the use of chromium trioxide, a toxic chemical used to prevent metal from rusting, according to La Lettre, a French industry newspaper.

Read more: When it comes to high-end Olympic fashion, all runways lead to Paris

A spokesperson declined to confirm the report, but said in a statement that the mint “has modified the varnish and optimised its manufacturing process to make it more resistant to certain uses observed of the medals by athletes”.

Faced with a deluge of deteriorating medals, the International Olympic Committee has vowed to find replacements.

“Damaged medals will be systematically replaced by the Monnaie De Paris and engraved in an identical way to the originals,” it said in a statement.

For LVMH, the Olympics were a coming-out party. It was a major foray into sports, and a moment to promote the company in a way that it had previously avoided, preferring instead to showcase its individual brands.

“Obviously because it’s the medal, it’s super high profile and everyone is asking the question how does this happen and especially coming from LVMH, whose raison d’etre ("reason for being" in French) is quality and precision,” said Michael Payne, who devised the IOC’s original marketing strategy. – ©2025 The New York Times Company

Follow us on our official WhatsApp channel for breaking news alerts and key updates!
fashion , Olympics , LVMH , Chaumet

Next In Style

Kendrick Lamar wore bell-bottoms at the Super Bowl – will it now become a trend?
Fashion's spotlight is now on guys, and these male stars are shining bright
Casual, cool, chic or avant-garde? The new fashion season checks all the boxes
'Incredibly moving': More brides are upcycling their mothers’ wedding dresses
In fashion, there is an appetite for utilitarian, basic and humble clothes
Can Calvin Klein's first female creative director bring 'sexitude' to the label?
How the children of celebrities are taking over the fashion world
Chappell Roan's style is a carefully constructed persona fuelled by microtrends
Escapism and surrealist fashion the focus at recent Paris Couture Week
Fashion designer Kim Jones' Dior exit leaves behind unanswered questions

Others Also Read