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Every aspect of medals creation was a challenge
By Jeff Oliver
Deseret News staff writer
Nature is not easily imitated.
Tony Morgan is well aware of this.
Morgan, O.C. Tanner's manufacturing project manager for the 2002 Winter Olympic medals, leads the team of technicians responsible for converting raw quantities of gold, silver, copper and zinc, into Utah river rocks.
The conversion has proven to be a particularly challenging brand of reverse alchemy.
The process, which Morgan and his staff invented as they went along, involves 15 steps and 20 hours of intensive labor for each medal.
Bucking the traditional round-is-right mentality of previous Olympic Games, Salt Lake's medals, with their dulled edges and irregular shape, at first seem more a piece of quickly molded clay then a meticulously crafted work of art.
And at 1.24 pounds each the medals in October, Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Mitt Romney said he wanted medal winners to leave Utah feeling as if they owned a piece of the state.
"We wanted something that feels much more like nature, something that comes from the earth," Romney said.
The details of the medals, on closer inspection, reveal just how much work went into their making.
The front of the medals feature the Olympic rings beneath the feet of a torch-bearing athlete. The athlete is emerging from a curtain of fire and ice.
The sculpture is made to look antique by means of a special glaze. On the back of the medals, Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, is featured in full sprinter's stride, holding an olive leaf above her head.
On each medal an event-specific relief sculpture is etched between Nike's forearm and her bowed head. These sculptures forced die cutter Dave McDaniel to produce 18 separate dies roup ran into some early problems when members realized they could not achieve the desired detail with their original metal press. So they purchased an $82,000 "profiling" machine, which shapes the medals and etches the words onto the surface.
However, when the machine was delivered it was much bigger then what the catalog had indicated. "We had to knock down a few walls," said Ron Smith, the medal profiler and engraver.
The group only began producing the unorthodox medals at full speed last January when former International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, following serious debate among IOC members, finally gave the go-ahead.
By then Mike Padilla, Patrick Warren and Gary Felice had worked for three months in a small office at O.C. Tanner headquarters. The three created the computer programs for the machines that produce the medals. Like everyone else involved with early production of the medals, they had been sworn to secrecy.
Morgan remembers covering the medals with a towel before transporting them from work station to work station.
McDaniel said he had to make it clear to friends and family that he would not talk about the medals. "They still asked all the time," he said.
The group managed to produce 861 medals without a word regarding the medal design being leaked to news reporters.
In the end, only 477 of the 861 medals will be awarded. The extras are for possible ties and for IOC and SLOC archives.
Morgan's entire team seems pleased to have their cat out of the bag. "It's been wonderful," Morgan says.
He admits that he wasn't too sure about the medal design at first. "However, the beauty of it grows as you work."
E-MAIL: jeffo@desnews.com
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February 8, 2002
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