Awakenings

Like some sort of biennial cicadas, Olympic fans across the world are slowly coming out of hibernation in anticipation of the lighting of the Olympic flame at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. But before I talk about Sochi, I thought that I should bring everyone up to speed with what Olympic stuff I've been up to since my last post in December 2012.

 

First a little background: During the fall of 2012, I put together my list of NOC pins from London for the Olympin Collector's Club - the world's oldest and largest club of Olympic memorabilia collectors. I have been doing this for about the last 10 years. I was not asked by the club to take on this duty because I know so much about NOC pins. I was asked to take it on because I am good with Excel and Word. If you've been following this blog for a while, you will know that most of the rare NOC pins are only seen by the fortunate few who have managed to obtain access to the Olympic Village. The rest of us have to hope for a sort of trickle-down effect to even see these pins, let alone acquire them. As a result, most of my work in building the NOC pin list consists of contacting the collectors who did have access to the Village and regurgitating everything that they tell me. But this year, I noticed that many collectors, rather than trading or selling the NOC pins that they acquired in London, were tapping into the worldwide demand for these pins and selling them online at auction sites like eBay. So every day, I would go through the hundreds of auctions involving NOC pins and cut and paste images of the pins being sold so that I would know what I which pins I'd already added to the list and which ones were new. This worked pretty well until I started asking the collectors with Village access about the pins that I was seeing. Many of these pins turned out to be fakes - excuse me, unauthorized - because, as my friend Sid reminds me, they are real pins, they are just not authentic NOC pins. Here is an example of one of the fakes:

Ever see Olympic spelled with a T? Me either!

 

After finding dozens of pins that were believed to be unauthorized, I made the fateful mistake of saying something to the effect of "How are lower level collectors like me supposed to know which ones are authentic and which ones aren't. Someone should do something about this..." No sooner had I clicked send on that email, than I received an email suggesting that I be the one to do something about it. Yikes! It was a put up or shut up moment. Being a person who believes that if you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem, I agreed. The Olympin Board of Directors, sensing that they were not likely to find another live one to take on this task, authorized the formation of the Committee on Unauthorized NOC pins in January 2013, put me in charge and found five other collectors to help me.

 

I will not go into the details, but basically, when we identify a new NOC pin, we contact the NOC in question and ask them whether their committee produced the pin. We also look at who is selling the pin and information obtained from other collectors in order to come up with a rating about the likely authenticity of the pin. This is going to be a really big deal for Sochi where we are going to try to upload images of all NOC pins, authentic and unauthorized, in as close to real-time as we can. If you'd like to see our handiwork, head over to the Authenticity Project. There is also a blog describing what we are doing in more detail.

 

At the end of my last blog in 2012, I mentioned that we were waiting to find out what Sean's grades would look like before deciding whether to go to Sochi. Well, his freshman year was pretty good - all A's and B's. Not the straight A's we were asking for, but close enough to think that he might get there. So, to hold up our end of the deal, we went through the declaration of interest process to let the ticket supplier know which events we were interested in buying - and got pretty good tickets: Opening Ceremonies, Biathlon relay, Men's Luge, Men's 4-man Bobsleigh, Men's and Women's Ice Hockey semifinals, several Speed Skating events and more Curling than you could shake a stick at. Unfortunately, once the school year started, his gaming habits, combined with running cross-country, being in the advanced choir and taking two honors courses proved too heavy a load and his grades tanked. That was the end of going to Sochi. Of course, given the recent bombings in Volgograd, I cannot say that I am too upset with this development, even though it means missing our first Winter Olympics since 1992. Actually, I am not too concerned that something really bad will happen during the Sochi Olympics although that is certainly a possibility. I am actually much more concerned about the Olympics having the feel of being held in the middle of a military base. I can just picture going through a metal detector with a bag containing perhaps a thousand small pieces of metal and then trying to explain to a very large Russian soldier who speaks no English and who is carrying a very large assault rifle that this is just a hobby!

 

But just because we will not be going to Sochi, does not mean we won't be paying attention. Since our committee is going to be protecting the Olympic collector community from fraudsters, I will be taking the whole 17 days of the Olympics off from work. I'll have a lot of work to do uploading images and getting pins authenticated, but I should still have more than enough time to watch as much Olympic coverage as there is and comment on what I see.

 

One positive development, as far as US Olympic coverage is concerned, occurred while we were in London. For years, the US Olympic broadcasts have been based on the ridiculous notion that the internet does not exist. NBC would broadcast the finals of the most popular events "implausibly live" during the prime evening hours. Depending on where the Olympics were being held, this could result in US viewers not seeing an event until 24 hours after it happened. But I learned that during London, NBC finally realized that showing an Olympic event live did not kill their audience for the same event in prime time. As a result, NBC plans to stream something like 1500 hours of live Olympic coverage - yippee!

 

The bottom line is that with live Olympic coverage, I've decided to continue my tradition of Olympic blogging. The only difference is that I won't be able to give you the tourist's view of the Olympics. That will have to wait until 2016 when we head to Rio de Janiero for the Summer Olympics. I hope that you will tune in anyway.

 

In the meantime, I've been getting in the Olympic spirit by watching the various US trials. My favorite story so far was from the Women's Long-Track Speed Skating trials. There was a woman named Jackie Munzel, who finished 7th out of 11 in the 5,000m, 13 out of 19 in the 3,000m and 16th out of 25 in the 1,500m. In each race, she set a personal best. I am sure you are wondering what the big deal is. Well, the big deal is that Jackie was born in 1963! When she was young, she was a national level figure skater and had a decent chance at making the US team for Sarajevo in 1984. But she developed a severe eating disorder and had to retire from skating to save her life. But she didn't give up skating and has provided power skating training to some National Hockey League players. In 2010, she was watching the Vancouver Olympics with her daughter and admitted that she regretted the way her skating career had ended; feeling that she had been given a gift and failed to use it properly. And so began a quest to make the Olympics in a type of skating that she had never tried. She didn't make the US team, but along the way, she did become the World Masters Speed Skating Champion and world record holder. I was thinking about that yesterday while I was hauling my butt around during my weekly three mile run - an athlete's body may slow down as they get older, but the drive that made them an athlete never has to end.