The Medal

My country has only one Olympic medal. It is a bronze medal, earned by our national hero five generations ago. It is our nation’s most valuable treasure. We keep it in a sealed vault in the Presidential Palace, with security cameras and an honor guard.

Children who get perfect grades are allowed to see the medal from five feet away for five seconds, a magnificent reward for their efforts. When the television stations end their broadcasts at the close of the day, they play the national anthem and show our medal, our pride, in all its glory.

It is not true that only three athletes competed on that occasion. It is not true that our hero was born in another country. It might be true that he was born of a virgin, that he was already running at an age when other babies do not even crawl, and that in his adolescence he got twelve young lasses pregnant in a single night.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, has—according to the latest census—some twenty thousand gold medals. No one knows the exact number, because no one cares at this point. A statistics professor inferred that approximately 32 percent of the medalists share the surname Petrov.

On returning to the Soviet Union, each new gold medalist receives in the mail an unsigned mimeographed letter with a three-line thank-you from the Communist Party; the medal is confiscated immediately. It is said that they are used to make electronic circuits for computers.

The silver medals are simply thrown into the foundry furnace, with no thank-you letter, to make spoons that will be exported to England. People say that the bronze medals are melted down to make the casings of the bullets with which their recipients will later be shot, accused of betraying the Party, given their lazy performance.