About Pins

After more than a year of planning, we are getting close to the start of our Olympic trip. But before we start, I thought that I would talk about how I began collecting Olympic pins and why, on any given day at the Olympics, I'll be wearing something like 5kg (11 lbs) of Olympic lapel pins!

The start of my collecting habit began many, many years ago with my grandmother Dorothy. Dorothy, who incidentally lived in London while I was growing up, believed that everyone should have a collection of some sort. She collected stamps and she and her husband Dan collected beer steins and copper pots. So, beginning around the time that I was perhaps 8 or 9, she began sending me First Day Covers from England. A First Day Cover is a special envelope and cancelation from the ceremonies held to commemorate the first day that a stamp is put into circulation. I remember in particular a large cover of the Bayeux Tapestry to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings where the Normans defeated the Saxons to gain control of England. This was in 1966. She also opened an account for me with a company called Fleetwood that would automatically send a couple US or United Nations First Day Covers to me each month. My parents continued this subscription after Dorothy died. So, by the time that I got ready to attend my first Olympics in 1980, collecting was already a habit.

The second step in my transformation into a "pinhead" occurred when I attended my first Olympic Games in 1980. At that point, I was a graduate student in Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY - about four hours drive from the tiny village of Lake Placid, host of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. This was the closest that the Olympics had ever been to where I lived so myself, my girlfriend (now wife) Beth and several of my roommates made plans to attend. Grad students are not the most affluent of people. In fact, our Research or Teaching assistantships bare paid enough for tuition, room & board, pizza and beer (not necessarily in that order of priority) so careful planning was required. To maximize our "Olympic exposure" while minimizing our costs, we decided that we would get up around 3-4 in the morning, drive the four hours to Lake Placid, attend 3 events, get in the car and drive home, arriving back in Troy around 2am the following day. Some of my experimental runs required me to be awake for up to 36 hours straight so this did not seem totally crazy to us. The three events (first run of Men's Giant Slalom, the Ski Jumping portion of the Nordic Combined competition and an Ice Hockey Game between Finland and the powerful Soviet Union team) were chosen because the ticket prices (except for hockey) were low and because we thought that we would be able to get from one event to the next without missing too much.

The first part of the plan worked perfectly. We got to the Olympic parking lot near the Interstate in plenty of time to get on a bus for the ride to our first event. Once at the venue, there was a small issue during the climb through the woods up a frozen stream to get to a good vantage point on the Giant Slalom course. At one point, Beth fell on the ice and slid well down the mountain before coming to a stop against a small tree (amazingly, she married me anyway), but the plan was generally working....until the event ended. We went to the place where we were told that the bus would take us to Ski Jumping and waited...and waited...and waited. We finally realized that not only had we missed the beginning of the Ski Jumping, we had missed the whole event. So when a bus finally arrived that was going into the village of Lake Placid, we jumped on. The Ice Hockey venue was right down the street, but we had about 4 hours before the gates opened so we decided to buy a few Olympic souvenirs and then walk down to take a look at the speed skating oval. I was walking along when a young woman wearing Olympic credentials around her neck walked up to my roommate Paul and pointed at an Olympic lapel pin of the Lake Placid mascot Roni the Raccoon that he had on his jacket. It was clear that she did not speak English, but it was also clear that she wanted that pin and that she wanted to trade a pin to get it. Paul had just bought the mascot pin at a store down the street for $5 so he jumped at the chance to get a more exotic one. We later concluded that the woman was a Figure Skater from the Soviet Union and that the pin was from the Soviet Skating championships.

I am not a very outgoing guy, so I thought that this was great! All I had to do was wear a bunch of Olympic pins on my coat and people from all over the world (especially athletes) would come up and talk with me. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but this was the start. Because of that initial contact with the Soviet figure skater, I have concentrated on collecting Olympic team pins and now have literally thousands of these pins. I generally try to collect dated team pins from each of the Olympics we've attended. However, there are a few specific countries for which I try to collect all of their pins. Those countries are Hungary, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Portugal and Taiwan (known in Olympic circles as Chinese Taipei). These countries have either produced pins for many years or have kept the same design for many years. For example, the Chinese Taipei pins are always large horizontal rectangles with the Olympic logo on the left and the National Olympic Committee's logo on the right:

 Team pins were originally created as a type of "ice-breaker" in the Olympic Village to give athletes a reason to meet athletes from other countries. Through the 1990's, it was very easy to trade pins with athletes. Then came 9/11 and everything changed. The Olympic Village is now a sort of armed fortress designed to keep the athletes secure and people like me away. This makes it very difficult to meet athletes to trade. So that leaves only a few options to keep my collection going. I can send money to each National Olympic Committee (NOCs) and hope that they send me some pins or I can buy the pins from traders who have somehow gained access to the Olympic Village. I certainly buy a lot of pins from other collectors, but I still get a thrill when I receive a package of pins from one of the NOCs. Here are a few dated London team pins that I've received so far:

 

While the goal was always to trade pins with athletes, wearing hundreds of pins at a time has attracted lots of other spectators over the years as well. Some just want to get pictures with "the pin guy". Some are collectors and want to trade. But these days, I get the most satisfaction from just handing a pin to a little kid who is staring at me like I'm some sort of metal-clad space alien. In fact, I bring hundreds of pins specifically to give them away. Just a smile from a child is enough for me, but sometimes these small gestures result in more. In Pinerolo (near Turin, Italy), our family walked past a women with her three kids aged perhaps 6-12 years old. I gave all three of the kids pins. We kept walking and several minutes later, the woman suddenly runs up behind us. As we understood it, she and her husband owned a store that sold, among other things, Swiss knifes. She gave us a hat with a Swiss flag on it in thanks for our kindness to her kids.

Another time, we were in one of the serpentine security lines to get into a venue and we would pass by the same people over and over as we worked our way through the line. One particular boy stared at me every time we went by. After the third or fourth time, I handed the boy a pin on his way by. Since our lines were going in opposite directions, he had no chance to react. But the next we passed, the boy smiled - and a man in a suit slightly behind the boy later handed me a pin. It turned out that he was an IOC (International Olympic Committee) official who had seen the whole exchange and wanted to give me one of their very hard to get pins in appreciation!

In case you are interested, the past journals that I've linked on this site are filled with many more experiences that we have had just because of these small pieces of metal. I hope that you'll read about many more over the next three weeks. In the meantime, I'll be spending a lot of time over the next week figuring out which of my thousands of Olympic pins to bring with me to Europe. Stay tuned!