Medals for 2012 Olympics unveiled in London

As work continues on the Olympic Park at Stratford in London, the medals for the 2012 Olympic Games were revealed on Wednesday.

For any competitor the treasured medals, which for the London 2012 Games come on a deep purple ribbon, will be the must-have accessory for their sporting career.

The front of all summer Olympic medals show images of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, stepping out of the depiction of the Parthenon to arrive in the host city.

For the reverse, metalwork designer David Watkins, the 2010 Royal Designer for Industry, created a design on five symbolic elements. It also has an image which is like a "force field of radiating lines".

The five symbolic elements include a dished background, which suggests an arena or a bowl, similar to the design of an amphitheatre. The core emblem is supposed to be a metaphor for the modern city and looks like a crystalline or jewel-like growth. The medal includes a grid which is supposed to reflect a sense of being together and outreach. The image is supposed to capture a feeling of radiating energy to match the athletes' achievements and effort. The River Thames appears as a fluttering baroque ribbon. There is also a square in the centre so that the overall medal has the imprint of a square in a circle.

Watkins, 2012 Olympic medals designer, said he is pleased with how the medals have turned out. "I am absolutely delighted with it. They've done a great job. I mean, I don't think it could have been done any better. I did my best and it's come out well."

The Olympic medals weigh between 375-400 grammes, they are eighty-five millimetres in diameter and seven millimetres thick.

Watkins said it took a lot of hard work to get the medal design right, a process which took months to complete.

"It is very difficult to quantify, I mean it was designed on a computer which means that there is.... once you've got the basic architecture of a form together it's all down to a lot of tweaking, a lot of moving detail around and so on and that went on for some months I think. In my studio you could spend hours and hours and hours making one adjustment of a tenth of a millimetre somewhere which you know in a struck medal is going to make a huge difference," he said.

British former triple-jumper Jonathan Edwards won gold in the Sydney Olympics in 2000 as well as a silver medal in Atlanta in 1996. He is chairman of the LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) Athletes Committee who were involved in the research development of the medal brief.

He is impressed with the final design.

"I think it's a very simple design, a very clean design. You know, you've got the logo on the back, if there's a back or front, I'm not quite sure.... but the logo there, very symbolic of London. The River Thames going through it. Then the other side, a very, I think arresting image of the Goddess of Victory. So I think that, and the size and the weight of it, it really does feel like a quality work of art," Edwards said.

Edwards believes that when athletes are presented with their medals over the 16 days of the Olympics they will be impressed.

"I think they look great and from a point of view of the athletes you want something I think, you know, is representative of the great performances they've given to win them. And I think this is a high quality medal. It's big it's heavy. It feels like a lot of time and care and effort has gone into it. And I think the test of it is when the athletes actually get them in 2012, and they've heard the anthem, the first thing they'll do, is they'll pick it up like this and they'll look at it and sort of, you know, feel it and it screams quality and I think they'll be very, very pleased with the time and effort the organising committee has gone into in order to produce it for them," he said.

Over 2,100 medals will be awarded in 302 Olympic ceremonies at more than 30 venues. Production of the Olympic medals will start later this year at the Royal Mint's headquarters in Llantrisant, South Wales.