Lol. It’s a good question. One of those “insider” bits of knowledge. Is it some fairly “natural” response like how across the globe children might poke erasers with pencils or people might chew pens? Is it a conditioned response? Did someone do it for some reason once and that image became popular and so now so many olympians just think that’s what you’re supposed to do or dream of one day biting their medal- like how cartoons and TV etc. show people “saying cheese” for photos so people just do that because it is “the thing to do”? Or is it as you postulate- that for various reasons- maybe a little bit of that second one- photographers just want a shot of a medal winner biting the medal and prompt the Olympian to do it?
Interesting indeed….
I did some very cursory checking and it seems most likely it is on the order of photographers.
It also seems that olympians have chipped a tooth doing this!
I was aware going in that it used to be fairly common to check the purity of gold via biting before more precise methods were common or available- gold being soft it shows bite marks when it is relatively high purity- but Olympic “gold” medals are mostly other metals like silver and copper- not solid high purity gold- so it’s still up for debate and some athletes may do it because they’ve seen it done or it is natural, but most likely are prompted to do so for the image.
Interesting indeed….
It also seems that olympians have chipped a tooth doing this!
I was aware going in that it used to be fairly common to check the purity of gold via biting before more precise methods were common or available- gold being soft it shows bite marks when it is relatively high purity- but Olympic “gold” medals are mostly other metals like silver and copper- not solid high purity gold- so it’s still up for debate and some athletes may do it because they’ve seen it done or it is natural, but most likely are prompted to do so for the image.