What goes into an Olympic medal? A digital picture of a nine-year old girl smiling by a pool after she won her first regional tournament. That late-night chat with Sebastian, the basketball coach, to schedule the next day’s training. Multiple alarms at 4:15, 4:20, 4:25… so the snooze button will not prevent a young surfer from riding her best wave at sunrise, when the tide is right. A call from dad: “You’ll do great, love,” he says.

Success probably carries these connotations and many more if you are a professional athlete. For champions at the Olympic and Paralympics Games at Tokyo in 2020, however, the memories stored in their medals will not only be their own.

The metal hanging from their neck will come from mobile phones used by millions of Japanese, as part of the host country’s program to use only recycled materials in the minting process. The Tokyo organising committee aims to produce their 5,000 medals with gold, silver and bronze retrieved from electronic waste.

This way, the nine-year old might be a boy from Osaka who never reached pro even if the winner is a 20-year old Ukrainian table tennis player. The basketballer might be an amateur from Kobe who pays his bills as a plumber. The alarms might have woken up a Tokyo accountant when she visited Costa Rica to surf several years ago. The dad could be, of course, any dad.

All these memories, once stored in smartphones and other handheld devices, would take the round glossy shape of an Olympic medal, one of the most coveted prizes in sport.

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