By Nicole Garrison-Sprenger
It could double as a shot put, but it’s worth a little too much to chuck in the dirt.

A 22-pound gold coin commemorating the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing is waiting in Burnsville for someone to plunk down $1 million for a piece of history. Now, if you’re a big fan of the Olympics, you could fly to Beijing, stay for a week, watch the Games live and buy a T-shirt for considerably less. But a million dollars for a coin that isn’t even old?

It turns out, a solid-gold coin that weighs as much as a 1-year-old child doesn’t come along every day.

The coin released by the China Mint is the biggest Olympic coin made to date, said Douglas Mudd, a curator at the American Numismatic Association money museum. “Twenty-two pounds — that’s a lot of gold,” he said. At present, Mudd said, “The coin market is very hot. We’re seeing record prices at practically every auction.”

Gold is selling for about $928 an ounce, which would make the jumbo coin that Burnsville-based GovMint.com is selling worth roughly $245,000 melted down. (Precious metals are measured in troy pounds, which contain 12 troy ounces.) Plus, the coin — with the Beijing 2008 Games logo on one side and an image of a Chinese temple towering above Olympic athletes on the other — is one of only 29 issued, and the only one released for sale in the United States. Seven inches in diameter, it comes in an ornate carved box of African Blackwood with a 35-pound carved stone dragon perched on top.

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