NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- If Michael Phelps were to melt down the eight gold medals he won at the Beijing Olympics Games and sell the gold, he could probably only make about $1,225.

The famed gold medals are mostly made of silver, not gold. Only six grams, or 0.19 ounce, of gold is required to coat the medal. With gold futures closing at $806 an ounce on Monday, an Olympic gold medalist couldn't ask much more for the precious metal -- but the value of the precious medal would be much higher.

"I wish these hard-working athletes got 'the real thing'," said Jon Nadler, a senior analyst at Kitco Bullion Dealers. "But the medals are worth more than their weight in gold anyway."

In 2004, Polish swimmer Otylia Jedrzejczak auctioned off her gold medal from the Athens Olympics for $82,599 and donated the money to a Polish charity helping children with leukemia. The Polish Mint made her a replica of her medal.

Currently available on Internet auction site eBay is a silver medal from the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. According to the listing, it's from a member of the Cuban baseball team, and carries a starting bid of $7,999.99.

Each Beijing Olympics gold medal weighs about 150 grams. The medal contains mostly silver, according to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Also for the first time, jade is being used for the Olympic medals.

Jade isn't traded in an open market so it is difficult to evaluate its price. Assuming a gold medal contains 146 grams of silver and six grams of gold, the metals in each medal would be worth a bit more than $215 based on Monday's closing prices.

The International Olympic Committee requires the gold medal to contain a minimum of six grams of gold. Huang Ping, vice president of Shanghai-based China Banknote Printing and Minting Corp., the producer of the medals, said in an interview with China Business News that the amount of gold in each medal was strictly controlled at 6.0 to 6.1 grams.

Despite an effort to reduce costs, record-high metals prices have meant that producing 6,000 gold, silver and bronze metals for the 2008 Olympics and the Paralympics is costing China millions of dollars.

Gold prices have more than doubled since the Athens Olympics of 2004. Ironically, China itself was blamed as one of the biggest contributors to the rise in commodity prices.

Producing the medals turned out to be very time consuming. One employee could only make 10 medals in one day when the company started the manufacturing process in October, Huang said.

The medals, with a diameter of 70 millimeters (2.76 inches) and a thickness of 6 millimeters, have a design inspired by China's traditional bi disk -- in principle, a flat disk with an opening in the center, historically made of jade and often inscribed with dragon patterns.

The medals have the standard design prescribed by the IOC on one side -- depicting the winged goddess of victory Nike and the Panathinaikos Arena. On the reverse side, the medals are inlaid with a disk of jade, which represents ethics and honor in China.

BHP Billiton BHP, -2.16% , the world's largest mining company, provided raw materials for medal production.

The company's Cannington mine in northwest Queensland, Australia, supplied silver used in the production of both the gold and silver medals. The Escondida mine in Chile supplied copper concentrate that contains gold for the gold medals, and the bronze was from Spence mine, also in Chile.