The term “what goes around, comes around” may be appropriate to utilize in the case of a Mexican soccer team winning Olympic Gold recently.

Although nobody knows exactly how much gold was taken by early Spanish invaders from Aztec or Mayan civilizations, lots of it ended up in the land of the Games of the XXX Olympiad.

Historians of the period allege that a vast majority of golden items pillaged by the Spanish were melted down either in Mexico itself or in Europe. They said, a good amount of it probably found its way over to England, having been plundered by English pirates that attacked Spanish booty ships en route for España.

Retrieving a minute portion of the precious metal didn’t even make a proverbial dent in British banks, it seems. You see, according to the Olympic Charter, the gold and silver medals must each be made of at least 92.5 percent pure silver and the gold medal must be gilded with at least six grams of gold. The price of gold, as most investors know, changes daily.

Assuming there’s six grams of gold in each medal, at 31.1 grams per troy ounce, that is about 0.2 troy ounces. With gold at $1100 per troy ounce, the value would be about $212.

The remainder of the gold medal is assembled out of silver. The price of silver also fluctuates, but at an average of $14.50 per troy ouance, and assuming the entire medal weighs 500 grams, the remaining silver in the gold medal hovers around $230, bringing the total value to around $450.

We multiply that by all the gold medals won by the Mexican soccer team and begin to see the entire picture. Add the other medals, three silver and three bronze and you get the final results; not very much gold came back this time around.

You might say it’s a start, but that’s about as good as it gets.

Now, let’s not take anything away from the great soccer played by the young Mexican team. It was a true historic even, judging from all the international media attention it garnered.. But the reality of the outcome is that once again, another nation made off with the gold. Check this out, sports fan – Telemundo’s broadcast of the widely anticipated “Great Golden Final” ranked as the most watched Olympic event in the history of the network, averaging 3.6 million total viewers and 2.2 million adults 18-49, according to the Nielsen experts.

The match also ranked as the highest-rated program among all of Telemundo’s weekend daytime soccer telecasts in its history.

Translation: mucho commercial dinero! And it all goes to American investors and maybe one Mexican that you might know as the richest hombre in the world.

( For what it’s worth,Telemundo is part of NBCUniversal, a joint venture of Comcast and General Electric.)

“Yeah, this sounds familiar,” said a Cal State University Chicana/o drama professor, Dr. Manuel José Pickett. “El indio does all the work and somebody else gets the gold.”

Once again, throughout Mexico, the word “Oro!” rang from manmade concrete canyons to majestic mountaintops as news of their countrymen’s achievement echoed throughout the former Aztec empire.

Somos de Oro -we are made of gold-exclaimed a newspaper headline in Mexico City. Even el presidente took time from battling drug-lords to laud his team with a personal phone call to Mexican Coach Fernando Tena. Almost the entire country paused to feel proud of their paisano’s outstanding sport performance on a world stage.

“What a difference this will make for our team,” said Eziquiel Vega, of Sacramento. “I recall another time when the Mexican team arrived from a World Cup drubbing and they were stoned by the fans !”

Many Californians agreed it was a good time to be Mexican. Or of Mexican descent.