What's Kim Yuna wearing around her neck? A history of Olympics medals.

Vancouver Olympics medals have an undulating pattern meant to evoke Canada's terrain. Others say it resembles a microwaved frisbee or a warped old music record.

That there, that oblong piece of metal around Vancouver Olympics figure skating champion Kim Yuna's graceful neck? Wait, that’s a medal?

Yes, it's bent. And no, it's not meant to resemble your mother's warped music record. Olympics medal designs have grown increasingly artistic over the past decade, with Winter Olympics hosts progressively pushing the medium’s boundary.

For the first time, the medals aren’t even flat. The Vancouver Olympics medals have an undulating pattern meant to evoke host province British Columbia’s mountains, ocean, and snow. It may also evoke a Salvadore Dali painting of drooping clocks.

"They look a bit like metal slabs that have been badly cut, with all the bends and warps of an old vinyl record left in the sun," says one person on the Web forum Gamesbids.com.

"They look like they've been run over by a train," says another commenter. "So flat and potato chip like."

"It's funny when former medal winners who are presenting medals at these games wear theirs, because medals seem to have gotten bigger and bigger over the years," says another.

To be extra sure these medals wouldn’t be overlooked, Vancouver made them big and heavy. They’re nearly four inches across. By comparison, Beijing’s medals were about 2.8 inches in diameter. Corrine Hunt, a Vancouver-based artist of Komoyue and Tlingit heritage, chose the orca as the motif for the medal design.

This isn't the first Olympics with an edgy design. But each recent Winter Olympics has come out with a quirky medal design, while each recent Summer Olympics has played it straight, with the standard thin circle depicting the goddess Nike.

In 2006, Turin’s hollowed-out medals evoked thoughts of bagels and doughnuts. In 2002, Salt Lake City broke the circular-pattern with an octagonal medal. In 1998, Nagano hollowed out their medals with a crescent at the top. And in 1992, Albertville made them mostly glass.

The only rules regarding the medal design come from the International Olympic Committee, which asks that gold and silver medals be at least 92.5 percent silver, and the gold medals must be gilded with at least 6 grams of pure gold. The medals must also be at least 60 millimeters in diameter and three millimeters thick.

Vancouver met those specifications, while also mixing in more than 140,000 tons of electronic waste (circuit boards and the like) destined for landfills.

“The 2010 medals are making Olympic and Paralympic metal history, as the medals will be the first to contain metals recovered from processing the circuit boards from end-of-life electronics (e-waste) otherwise destined for the landfill,” according to a press release from Teck, a Vancouver-based mining, mineral processing, and metallurgical company.

The Royal Canadian Mint produced 615 Olympic and 399 Paralympic medals for the 2010 Winter Games. According to Vancouver2010.com, Teck Resources Limited, a Vancouver-based mining, mineral processing, and metallurgical company, supplied the 2.05 kilograms of gold, 1,950 kg of silver and 903 kg of copper used in the production of the medals.

The Canadian Mint offers a nice history of the process that went into the Vancouver medal design (click here for that). Original proposals called for two pieces, one metal and one wooden, held together magnetically.

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