Last updated: 23 Sep 2026 | 14 Views |
Let's talk about medals for a second, because most of them are liars.
You've seen them a thousand times. Shiny disc, ribbon, athlete biting it for the cameras like it's made of chocolate. They're designed to look flawless, like the person wearing it woke up one morning already a champion. No scars, no bad days, no forty missed alarms at 5 a.m. Just gleam.
Then Aichi-Nagoya 2026 came along and someone decided to make a medal that tells the truth instead.
Pick one up — and this year, plenty of Thai athletes have gotten the chance to — and you'll notice something odd on the surface. Cracks. Tiny fault lines running across the metal like a plate that shattered and got glued back together by someone who actually cared about the plate. That's not a manufacturing defect. That's the entire point.
The man behind it is Daisuke Shiba, a Japanese designer who runs a company called MERRY BEETLE and an outfit called TOGU, and who was handed a brief that basically amounted to: make a medal that means something. Most designers would've opened a laptop. Shiba opened a box of ceramic discs and started smashing them.
Not once. Over and over. He'd break a disc, study the fragments, break another, study those too. He wasn't hunting for a specific shape he already had in his head — he was letting the breakage decide. The idea was to find beauty in the wreckage instead of designing wreckage to look pretty after the fact. If you've ever tried to fake being fine after a bad loss, you already understand the difference.
Here's the part that turns a neat design trick into something worth writing home about: those cracks aren't decoration. According to the people who made the medal, each fragment stands for an injury, a defeat, a setback — the stuff every single athlete on that podium had to survive to get there. Nobody wins a gold medal on a clean run. Somebody tore a hamstring in March. Somebody lost eleven straight matches before the twelfth one clicked. Somebody got dropped in the third round and still finished the fight. None of that gets sanded off the medal. It gets built into it. The broken pieces reassemble into one solid object, and that object is stronger for having been broken in the first place. Try telling me that's not the most honest trophy design you've heard of all year.
The specs, for anyone who likes their inspiration backed by a spec sheet: gold medals weigh in around 265 grams, pure silver under the hood with at least a gram of gold plating on top — because straight solid gold medals stopped being a thing decades ago and everyone quietly agreed not to mention it. Silver medals run about 264 grams of pure silver. Bronze comes in around 222 grams of red brass, a 95-5 mix of copper and zinc. Every medal, gold, silver or bronze, is 80 millimeters across and 5 millimeters thick. Numbers a jeweler would appreciate.
But the best number isn't on that list. Part of the metal in these medals used to be somebody's old phone. Organizers ran what they're calling a Recycled Medal Project, collecting small electronics — the dead phones and busted circuit boards sitting in junk drawers across the region — and melting components down into the medals themselves. So before it hung around the neck of an Asian Games champion, some of that metal was quietly doing nothing useful in somebody's kitchen drawer. That's not just a nice sustainability footnote. It's the same theme as the cracks: ordinary, discarded things becoming part of something that matters.
Even the accessories are doing more work than you'd expect. The ribbon is cut in the silhouette of kakitsubata, the Japanese iris that happens to be Aichi Prefecture's official flower, with sweeping curved lines meant to echo an athlete in motion. The medal case is an octagon carved from hinoki, Japanese cypress grown locally in Aichi — the same wood used in the region's tea ceremony tradition — and the eight-sided shape nods to the character 八, meaning "eight," which has historical ties to the clans that once ruled the area. It's the kind of detail nobody notices on television and everybody should.
The Games' own slogan is "Imagine One Asia," built around the idea of unity found through difference, and it's hard to imagine a medal that captures that better than one literally assembled from broken pieces. It's also playing out live on the field right now. Thai fighter Amp Kanjutha didn't walk a straight line to her historic MMA gold at these Games — she went from Muay Thai world champion to jiu-jitsu world champion to MMA champion, reinventing herself twice before the medal ever got near her neck. Thailand's teqball team, meanwhile, went from a sport almost nobody in the country had heard of a few years back to sweeping all three golds the very first time it appeared at the Asian Games. Different sports, same architecture as the medal itself: a pile of setbacks, quietly assembled into gold.
So no, this isn't just a design footnote for people who like trivia. It's a small, deliberate argument about what a trophy is actually for. The good ones were never supposed to be about the shine. They're supposed to carry the story of everything it took to get there — the injuries, the losses, the ordinary junk-drawer materials, all of it fused into one object you can hold in your hand. Whether it's a crystal trophy sitting on an office shelf or a medal hanging under the lights in Japan this week, the ones worth keeping are the ones honest enough to show their cracks. Everything else is just metal that got lucky with the lighting.
