A member of the USA skateboard team has criticised the quality of the Olympic medals after the bronze he won started to deteriorate.

Nyjah Huston revealed the markedly different condition of his medal just a week after winning it in Paris, with the backside of the medal chipped and losing its bronze colour.

“So these Olympic medals look great when they’re brand new,” Huston said in the video posted on Instagram. “But after letting it sit on my skin with some sweat for a little bit and letting my friends wear it over the weekend…” before zooming in on the damaged medal to show the damage.

Huston is no stranger to collecting medals, having won gold 12 times in the X Games and six times in the World Championships. He also has nine silvers and four bronzes across both competitions.

“They’re [the Olympic medals] apparently not as high quality as you’d think,” he added. “It’s looking rough.

“I don’t know, Olympic medals, we gotta step up the quality a little bit. The medal [is] looking like it went to war and back.”

Each medal awarded at this Olympics, including silver and bronze, contains a piece of the Eiffel Tower preserved during renovations to the Paris landmark.

Each forms an 18-gram hexagon in the middle of every medal, and on the back is the goddess of victory Nike.

The Paris Mint made just over 5,000 medals in total, with 2,600 for the Olympics and 2,400 for the Paralympics. Each weighs around 530g and was designed by the luxury brand Chaumet, which provides a dark blue box to try and preserve their medal.

The size of the medals at the Paris Games has been remarked upon, but the sizing has been standardised since London 2012 with every summer Games medal a width of 85mm exactly.

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For those glued this week to the Olympic athletics from the Stade de France, there has been a common sight on the feet of gold-medal winning athletes.

With a striking colour pattern you might associate with a cheetah, Nike launched its latest design in July even if the actual ‘super spikes’ have been on the feet of leading athletes all year.

And, so far in Paris, athletes wearing either the Air Zoom Victory 2 or Dragonfly 2 have won all six of the men’s and women’s races from 800m upwards. Nike also has the bookmakers’ favourites in the remaining four.

Having a vast stable of exceptional runners certainly helps — and it all came down to fractions in the men’s 1500m when Cole Hocker sprinted past Josh Kerr, who was wearing gold-branded bespoke Brooks spikes — but a clean sweep come Saturday night now looks increasingly possible.

The clear sense inside the sport is still that we are dealing with a much more of a level playing field than in Tokyo — where some runners with other brands even wore unmarked Nike shoes — and this is supported by the sprint events in Paris and a spread of world records already this year variously in New Balance, Adidas and Puma as well as Nike footwear.

Even so, you do not need athletes of the calibre of Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson and Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen — still the favourite over 5,000m even after his 1500m defeat — to be convinced that Nike is still innovating in this era of Pebax-foamed and carbon-plated ‘super’ shoes and and spikes.

Nike’s winning pair

Nike has two main designs in the middle and longer-distance races; the Victory 2, which includes a Zoom Air bubble in the front foot of the sole that can even have its PSI adjusted according to the weight of an athlete. It also has a full-length carbon plate inside the ZoomX and is aimed more at the middle-distance races of 800m and 1500m.

The Dragonfly 2 is more for the 5,000m and 10,000m and, although it does not have the yellow air bubble which is the key visual differentiator between the two models, it does have the carbon plate and foam. Personal preferences vary to the extent that Ingebrigtsen opts for what he sees as the faster Victory 2 over 1500m but the more stable Dragonfly 2 in 5,000m and for much of his high-volume training.

Hodgkinson wore the Dragonfly in 2021 but did not like the first version of the Victory and her feedback has helped inform the development of this latest “less aggressive” model.

“We did a lot of talking and innovation with the Nike team in Oregon over the past two years,” she says. [“They asked] ‘Why don’t you wear the Victorys?’ The old ones weren’t as stable. It was really cool to be involved in those conversations. The new ones are lightweight, secure, fast and so I wear them all the time.”

Hodgkinson was also asked to try out prototypes under development when she raced near its Oregon headquarters in May. “Keely just helps, by saying: ‘I like this’ or: ‘No, I don’t like that — that’s horrible’,” says her coach Trevor Painter. “There were some shoes she was wearing that were a bit flimsy when she was running on the bend. So they’ve got to grips with that and the new Victory 2 shoe that she races in, she just loves. We have seen some prototypes of what’s coming up. They’re like something from Back to the Future.”

All ‘super spikes’ at the Olympics must be commercially available and, if a new prototype is used, World Athletics has a specialist team to check that it is within guidelines. Key requirements are that the heel-stack height cannot exceed 20mm on the track or 40mm on the road and every athlete must declare what shoe they are wearing in advance of competing.

‘Every shoe company has stepped up’

New Balance, which also had ‘super spikes’ in Tokyo, and Brooks are among those brands who have a smaller pool of elite athletes and believe that they can make this work to their advantage by developing even more individualised shoes. “Every shoe company has stepped up,” says Kerr, Britain’s 1500m world champion and Olympic silver medallist. “From Brooks, the investment into the technology has been huge. They were able to make me my own spike this year. There’s a lot less athletes at Brooks, so we’re very individualised and the spikes are made very specifically. I get a lot of say.”

New Balance, for whom Gabby Thomas has already won the 200m, worked with both Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Femke Bol, the two greatest 400m hurdlers in history, on developing its Fuel Cell MDX line at its Boston laboratory, which is used in all distances from 400m upwards.

“Our goal has always been to be the most boutique sports brand in the world — we always err on the side of few, bigger, better,” said Kevin Fitzpatrick, the vice president for running. “We want to make sure that we have the resources to really understand the athlete and, as importantly, their body, and biomechanics. That allows us to spend a lot more time with Femke, a lot more time with Sydney versus having to spread our time over hundreds of athletes. Our original hypothesis… going back to 2016… was each individual is so different that we need individually customised track spikes.”

New Balance also very deliberately focused on its track spikes at a time when much of the industry was ploughing huge resources into the road shoes. “We were the first brand that actually put carbon fibre directly in contact with the track surface,” says Fitzpatrick, who says that athletes are “crushing records” from High School upwards. “We’re also constantly looking at how we tweak the chemical make-up of those forms… to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to introduce as much energy return at the same time that we’re reducing weight.”

Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, says the governing body will continue to monitor designs but encourage technical progress, even if the world records from his generations continue to be rearranged. “I don’t think an international federation, or any organisation over civilisation, is best served by strangling technology,” he said. “If we get really fast times in the stadium, I would welcome that.”

Nike gold medals so far

Men

1500m Cole Hocker: Victory 2
10,000m Joshua Cheptegei: Dragonfly 2
3,000m steeplechase Soufiane El Bakkali: Dragonfly 2

Women

800m Keely Hodgkinson: Victory 2
5,000m Beatrice Chebet: Victory 2
3,000m steeplechase Winfred Yavi: Dragonfly 2

Nike possible medals to come

Men

5,000m Jakob Ingebrigtsen (favourite): Dragonfly 2 (Ingebrigtsen wears Victory 2s for the 1500m)
800m Djamel Sedjati (favourite): Dragonfly 2

Women

1500m Faith Kipyegon (favourite): Victory 2
10,000m (favourite) Beatrice Chebet: Victory 2

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