"he became a gold" (medalist) 97*
"he was a gold" 11,500
"he won gold" 41,000
"he won a gold" 51,800
"he won the gold" 58,000
*'~gold; ~the gold' both get even less hits, 27 and 37 respectively.
There are other ways to express things, but those are the items I specifically searched for. Why, you ask?
It's not that I find the first form ungrammatical (the fact that it is attested even 97 times surely means something), or have a huge preference for the rest; in fact, my concern isn't really with examining much less teaching this particular phrase-for-a-notion, but more with what the infrequent item really tells us about 'became' (this is a sentence from a high school textbook here in Japan). A quick glance at the entry for 'become' in e.g. the LongmanDOCE4 soon shows that things are rarely that simple with/surrounding this word, and the low Google hits seem to have confirmed my suspicion that that item is a little too neat and contrived (but I'm not sure I'd want to be teaching more complex examples for 'become' to high school students - I might even not teach it at all, at that level).
Anyway, digression aside, is Googling ultimately a matter of the "first past the post" wins? (Heh, only joking,it's more just a tool to give us a rough feel for, and only sometimes, outside of looking closer, very clear confirmation of, forms, right?).
1 [linking verb] to begin to be something, or to develop in a particular way:
George became King at the age of 54.
Pollution from cars has become a major problem.
The weather became warmer.
Slowly my eyes became accustomed to the darkness.
Helen became increasingly anxious about her husband's strange behaviour.
