Commonwealth Games Wrap: 3 Medal Design Choices Worth Adopting 🦁

Birmingham 2022 closed Monday. Three medal-design choices the host nation made are already showing up in regional sport medal briefs across Asia.

Recycled-Content Casting Got Mainstream

Birmingham's medals incorporated recycled brass from old railway carriages — a story they told publicly throughout the games. The lesson: medals with a recycled-content story now have an unbeatable narrative hook over plain virgin-metal medals. For 2023 briefs, recycled content should be the proposed baseline.

Tactile Edge for Visually Impaired Athletes

Following the Paralympic model, Birmingham medals featured tactile edge differences (different rim textures for gold/silver/bronze) so visually impaired athletes can identify rank by touch alone. Cost on a custom die: zero. Worth specifying on every adaptive event from now on.