This Is Why Olympians Bite Their Medals In Photos

Gold medals are actually made of chocolate! (JK.)

You've probably seen a million, billion, gazillion photos of Olympians biting down on their new medals.

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Yum, tasty snack...?

And it's not a new phenomenon, either.

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This is the 1991 Great Britain track-and-field team.

So why does everyone chomp down on their medal like it's a stick of beef jerky?

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The answer is that the photographers pretty much force them to (lol).

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“It’s become an obsession with the photographers,” David Wallechinsky, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, told CNN. “I think they look at it as an iconic shot, as something that you can probably sell. I don’t think it’s something the athletes would probably do on their own.”

Because you can only have so many dorky photos of medalists just standing there and smiling, right?

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And of course, one historic way to tell if gold is real is to bite down on it.

Heritage Auctions / Wikipedia / Via en.wikipedia.org

Your teeth will leave marks in real gold, which is soft.

(Psssst: The gold medal is actually made mostly of silver.)

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Rio's gold medals, like all gold medals since 1912, aren't made of solid gold. (They're only about 1.2% gold this year.)

Biting your medal can be hazardous. In 2010, German luger David Moeller (left) chipped his front tooth while biting his silver medal for photographers.

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Yeah, it's a pretty weird tradition.

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Some Olympians choose to kiss their medals instead.

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But without it, we would never have known about Ryan Lochte's legendary 2010 grill.

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Now we just need a photo of someone chomping down on their colorful Rio figurine.

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YOUR MOVE, SIMONE.

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