Now this is what we call an ironic story. You know how Olympians are oftentimes so proud after winning a medal that they don’t let it leave their side, even if it means sleeping with it and wearing it around their neck while they’re sitting on the toilet? It was exactly that type of “cautious” behavior that led Brazilian judoka Felipe Kitadai to have a slight accident with the bronze medal he won over the weekend.
Kitadai won the medal by defeating Elio Verde of Italy in the -60K category. According to Reuters, he had a mishap with the bronze medal when he decided to take it with him into the shower.
“He was taking a shower with the medal when he dropped it,” a team spokeswoman said on Monday. “He then slept with the medal and realized later that it was broken. It wasn’t a very smart thing to do.”
The damage was to the top of the medal where the ribbon loops through a hoop. Fortunately for Kitadai, the bronze medals are extremely inexpensive compared to their gold and silver counterparts. Olympic officials have agreed to give him a replacement medal.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone accidentally break an extremely important piece of hardware and it won’t be the last. The important thing is that we all learn a valuable lesson from this and other moments of clumsiness — don’t shower with your trophies.
