French Company Wants People To Stop Blaming It For Olympic Medals Being In Terrible Condition

We're about a year away from the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, but last summer's Summer Olympics in Paris is still grabbing headlines.

Or, more specifically, the sorry condition of a lot of the medals is grabbing headlines.

According to The New York Post, luxury brand owner LVMH is fending off claims that it is to blame for some serious issues with some of the medals dished out at the Games, specifically bronze ones.

A reported 100 athletes who took home bronze medals have requested replacements after the medals displayed extreme degradation.

Now, I've never won any Olympic medal (yet, I'm not ruling it out) but I'm pretty sure that they're supposed to hold up a little bit longer than six months. In fact, a medal from the 1904 Games in St. Louis recently sold and even at 120 years old, that medal looked to be in good shape.

LVMH owns Chaumet, a big-name French jeweler that has been getting blamed for the faux pas (which I believe is French for "f--k up"), but the company wants to make it very clear that this was not its doing.

Bronze medals from the 2024 Paris Olympics have been rusting, but luxury conglomerate LVMH says that while its company designed the medals, it didn't manufacture them. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

The luxury conglomerate told The Post that while Chaumet was behind the design of the medals — which included a chunk of the Eiffel Tower embedded in them — they had nothing to do with the production of them. That was handled by the French mint  Monnaie de Paris.

"That responsibility lies solely with La Monnaie de Paris and the International Olympic Committee," an LVMH spokesperson said. "LVMH has no connection to this aspect of the process and will not be commenting on this matter."

The Monnaie de Paris has openly admitted since the games that there was an issue with the varnish on the medals but chalked that up to new European Union regulations that do not allow for the use of chromium trioxide, which is typically used to ward off rust.

Well, take note Milano Cortina Olympic Committee. You'd better dunk those medals in some chromium trioxide unless you want some egg on your face months after the Olympic flame has been extinguished.