Why are the winners holding stuffed animals instead of medals?

Shortly after the most triumphant moments of their lives, the winning Olympic athletes are holding not the medals they’ve dreamed of for years, if not decades, but stuffed animals encased in a plastic shell.

A celebratory ceremony immediately follows the end of each medal-awarding event, but the athletes don’t receive their medals until a follow-up ceremony the next day. In the first ceremony, the glowing athletes ascend the familiar three-tier platform, where Summer Olympians would have a medal placed around their necks.

Instead, the winners in the Beijing Olympics are handed something of a placeholder: A stuffed-animal version of Bing Dwen Dwen, the panda Olympic mascot, dressed in a shell of ice resembling a spacesuit and flanked by a golden fabric wreath of pine, bamboo and plum. All three winners, whether gold, silver or bronze, get the same souvenir, one that is barely distinguishable from those available in fan merchandise stores.

And a plush Bing Dwen Dwen is hard to come by. Fans have waited for hours and lined up at stores before they open for a chance to buy the souvenir, which has been limited to one per person. Officials have promised more will be available, and nearly a million people watched a livestream of their production at a factory in Fujian Province on Thursday.

“We’ve collected quite a few things at the Olympics so far, so I have a kind of treasure of things to bring home to the family,” Isabelle Weidemann, a bronze medal winner in the women’s 3000-meter speedskating event, said of the placeholder.

Getting to hold the actual medal on Sunday, a day after her event, felt “incredibly different” from holding the stuffed panda, she said.

“It’s a lot more emotional, too,” she said.

In the second ceremony, held in a venue dedicated solely to handing out medals, the winners are paraded across a stage, as a few hundred fans cheer near the Olympic cauldron. The athletes ascend another three-tier platform before members of the International Olympic Committee hand them their medals, which they put on themselves. They are allowed to remove their masks for a moment.

A similar two-ceremony format was used in the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang.

Arianna Fontana, who won a silver medal as part of Italy’s mixed team short-track speedskating, said on Sunday after her medal ceremony that it was nice to receive her medal with more people watching, compared to the largely empty short track stadium.

“Now it’s real,” she said. “Yesterday there was a lot of adrenaline, a lot of emotion, and maybe it took a little bit to understand what really happened.”

She continued: “Today we have this medal on our necks, and it feels amazing.”