Russia's 2014 Olympic Medals Are Pretty Badass

The organizers of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi — the games are less than a year away! — unveiled the medals that will be bestowed on the victorious competitors in St. Petersburg today, and, well, they look really cool. 

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The three new medals feature, according to a statement, Sochi's "Patchwork Quilt," described as "a mosaic of national designs from the various cultures and ethnicities of the Russian Federation." You can see those designs in the mountain-like cut-out, because, you see: "The medals depict the landscape of Sochi, with the sun's golden rays reflecting through a prism of snowy mountain tops onto the sandy beaches of the Black Sea coast." There are also a lot of them — a record 1,300, to be exact — because of the events added to the upcoming games (go, wrestling!), and they are "the largest and heaviest Olympic medals ever handed out," according to Barry Petchesky of Deadspin. 

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These are pure Russia, according to Russian speed skater Svetlana Zhurova. "I look at this Sochi-2014 medal here and understand that nobody will ever doubt the fact that this medal was won in Russia," she said, according to RT. "All the codes, patterns of Russian tradition have been encrypted into this medal. There is ice and flight in this medal…"

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But non-Russians seem to like them, too. Hockey blogger Chris Peters tweeted: "Sochi did good on the hardware. Real good." The word "awesome" was tossed around on Twitter.  

So take a look. Here's gold: 

Here's silver: 

Here's bronze: 

And here's Putin taking a look. He looks pretty pleased.