Last summer, I watched a bit of the Paris Olympics. I wasn't wild about the opening and closing ceremonies, which are normally my favorite parts. I really missed the teams all marching in, as I like to look at (and critique) their costumes. It was hard to see them, given that the teams paraded in via boat, and a lot of them were wearing rain ponchos over their costumes. Quel dommage!
Anyway, I'm enough of a homer - USA! USA! - to keep tabs on the medal counts, and was happy that the US won the most. USA! USA!
What I wasn't aware of was that the medals were designed by Chaumet, a company that's part of LVMH, the French luxury goods group that owns brands like Moët Hennessy and Louis Vuitton. In fact, if I'd been asked, I would have said that the medals were the responsibility of the International Olympic Committee, and that they're the same every time.
Well, silly unobservant me.
I guess I wasn't paying all that much attention, but:
...in the buildup to the 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 Élysée 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 jewelry designers, told The New York Times 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.(Source: NY Times)
All well and good until it wasn't so well and good.
The problem was largely with the bronze medals. Figures, no? Not that it's not plenty impressive to win a bronze medal at the Olympics, but doesn't it just figure that the least of the medals would be the junkiest. Bronze to begin with, and now this...
Monnaie de Paris, the French mint which collaborated with Chaumet/LVMH on the medal - Chaumet doing the designing, the mint doing the manufacturing - has taken full reponsibility for the fiasco. Seems like the deterioration is due to a problem with the varnish, which had recently been changed to comply with EU "regulations banning the use of chromium trioxide, a toxic chemical used to prevent metal from rusting." The mint has now modified the varnish recipe, which will be used for the replacement medals.
Hopefully, the new varnish will work. Sure, if the worst thing to happen to an Olympic athlete is that their medal crumbles in their hands, they'll have led a pretty charmed life. Still, who wants to see the symbol of their accomplishment in ruins, especially when I'm sure that for plenty of these athletes - especially the ones whose careers are more amateur than monetized - showing off their prizes to friends and family is a big part of the Olympic payoff.
Anyway, LVMH has been just fine with the Monnaie de Paris taking the blame.
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’être is quality and precision,” said Michael Payne, who devised the I.O.C.’s original marketing strategy.
If your "raison d’être is quality and precision," then you'd think that LVMH would have insisted on more oversight throughout the process. Imagine if your Louis Vuitton bag fell apart, and LVMH pointed its finger to an outsourced manufacturer? (I have no idea whether Vuitton bags are produced in-house or not.) Imagine if you popped your bottle of Moët and a mouse head popped out with the bubbles, and LVMH blamed the bottler?
I'm pretty sure that Moët is bottled by Moët; just making a point here. And the point is that the LVMH brand is pretty darned precious to them. Not that the Monnaie de Paris is blameless - you'd think they would have time-tested the new varnish formula a bit - but you'd also think LVMH would have paid a bit more attention to something as visible as an Olympic medal.
Sacre bleu! (Sacre bronze?) Quelle horreur!
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