PinheadedBy flooding the Olympic pin market, ACOG took the fun out of collectingby Alexander Wolff
If you look around you will notice that almost every lapel south of Chattanooga sags like a withered magnolia leaf from the weight of scores of Izzy pins, pictogram pins, torch pins, poster pins, logo pins, sponsor pins, polar bear pins, guitar pins, legacy pins, media pins, flag pins, pin-on-pin pins, milestone pins, bid pins, venue pins, national Olympic committee pins and pin-collecting pins.
You may also notice that my lapel is unencrusted and standing tall.
Countdown and Holiday Pins
The 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer first issued these pins to observe calendar milestones (e.g. 1,000 days to go, 365 days to go) and special days of the year. 1996 Summer Games pin favorites have featured Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Valentine's Day.
After nearly eight faithful years in the hobby, I am hereby and forthwith, publicly and irrevocably, declaring myself to be a copyrighted, trademarked and officially licensed ex-, former and erstwhile pin collector. A pin collector who is no more. A pin collector who has ceased to be.
Yes, I'm aware that pins have always gone with the Olympics the way up close goes with personal. I was infected in Seoul in 1988. A few days into those Summer Games I fastened my duplicate pins onto a towel cadged from my hotel room and like a vagrant laid it on the sidewalk, hoping to scare up some action. I returned home with the beginnings of a collection, then joined an association of the similarly afflicted, the Olympic Collectors Club, and began swapping through the mail.
Media Pins
Issued by the international press organizations that cover the Games—such as NBC, Sports Illustrated, Westwood One Radio Network and The Associated Press—to their respective staffs and guests.
Packages began to appear in my mailbox from Gilbert in France, Menashe in Israel and Tibor in Slovakia. Mike from Syracuse, a sweet-tempered, 400-pound guy who signed letters "Pincerely," was only one of many Stateside characters with whom I swapped. Another, Pat from Seattle, plans to go into police work, and given the ingenuity with which he sources out pins, crooks will rue the day he chose his profession.
For a few heady years—through Barcelona in 1992 and Lillehammer in '94—a pin was more than a souvenir to me. It was a business card doubling as an objet d'art, and the surest way to a smile was to work out a trade. For my own collection I concentrated on pins issued by each country's national Olympic committee (NOC). In the years since Seoul there has been no more fascinating type of Olympic pin than this, as nations have sprouted up like rye grass after a spring rain. Every few months some breakaway republic, contested corridor or only-habitable-at-low-tide atoll declares itself part of the Olympic movement, then mints a pin, touching off a frenzy among the hard core to add it to their collections.
Sponsor Pin
Produced and distributed by the Games' Official Sponsors. The design may include the Olympic rings, the symbols and icons of the particular Games and their own corporate logos. Some special sponsor pins, called guest badges, go to executives, clients, and other VIPs a corporation is hosting.
NOC pins can't be bought in stores and only rarely through pin dealers. Because they must be ferreted out, by sending off letters of supplication to exotic boîtes postales in places like Ouagadougou, or by biennially staking out the Olympic Village, or by swinging Jerry Krause-esque deals with other hobbyists who might have duplicates, each enters your collection with story and ceremony. "Zaire today, Gabon tomorrow" is the NOC collector's credo. (And the hunt isn't just fun, boys and girls, it's educational! You too could soon tell Mauritius from Mauritania, Slovenia from Slovakia, Chad from Jeremy.)
Most rewardingly, NOC pins have always had character, the no-two-are-alike quintessence that mass-produced, mass-marketed souvenir pins can never have. I have a pin from Bhutan that looks as if it has been hammered from tin by a monk in some Himalayan aerie. Paraguay's pin seems to be cut from a discarded beer can, while Uzbekistan's appears to have been kneaded out of Play-Doh in a Tashkent day-care center. I keep two South Africas—a politically collect pair, one black and one white. My smallest is a hand-painted shield from Estonia on which the Olympic rings are arrayed in a row, like a line score from a pitching duel. As for my largest, well, let's just say that I could cover my whole booty with Djibouti.
Commemoratives
Produced by or under the license of an Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG). These can feature the Games' logo and symbols, the mascot(s), the pictograms, the venues, events associated with the Games (i.e. the Torch Relay), notable locations in the host city or aspects of the local culture.
Other kinds of Olympic pins hold little appeal for me, and some of the mem-horri-bilia being issued for the Atlanta Games interest me even less. "Countdown" pins marked the days left until the torch was to be lit. "Spec-Tacular" pins have a built-in noose for hanging sunglasses. "Dangle" pins feature appendages that hang like fishing lures. "Bridge" pins integrate elements from both Lillehammer and Atlanta. And there are pins to celebrate Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving—every occasion but that time Billy Payne picked up a vial of Goody's headache powder down at the Piggly Wiggly.
After Lillehammer I had thought pin collecting was about to enter an age of enlightened sophistication. Coca-Cola, which had served hobbyists well by setting up pin-trading centers at every Games since Calgary in '88, established something called the 1996 Olympic Games Pin Society. For $19.96 members received a sumptuously illustrated calendar with collecting lore and advice, plus a member's pin, a membership card and a monthly publication called Pin Points—everything but a secret decoder pin. But within a few months Pin Points had degenerated into a mail-order catalog. Space originally devoted to tips, articles, Q&A's and collector-to-collector classifieds was given over almost entirely to flogging scores of grotesque new renderings of Izzy and other dross. The only vaguely "social" aspect to this Society was that moment when the 800-number operator asked, "And which credit card will you be using today?"
IOC Badges
Created by the International Olympic Committee to mark its periodic board meetings, sessions and Congresses. Likenesses are often made available to the public at the time of the meetings.
Meanwhile the organizing committee for the Atlanta Olympics (ACOG) had decided to seek an unprecedentedly large sum in licensing revenue from pins: $10 million. When it became clear that no single manufacturer could pay so handsome a guarantee, Atlanta Centennial Olympic Properties (ACOP), ACOG's licensing arm, sold licenses to five separate manufacturers. Having held up licensees for huge sums, ACOP could hardly put a cap on how many each might produce. So, to justify its extortionate outlay, each company is turning out huge quantities of pins—by June, ACOP had already approved more than 6,000 designs—and hanging an unprecedentedly high price tag on each. Aminco International and Imprinted Products, the two licensees producing most of the pins for Atlanta, have charged retailers a base price of $3 per pin, while pins at the last few Olympics wholesaled at $2 to $2.50 apiece. The upshot: Collectors are paying $4.95 and up for pins that cost 50 cents to 60 cents to make.
With so many companies producing so many units of so many designs, collectors feel that they've been impaled on a pin post. "Don't blame the licensees," says Pat from Seattle. "They're just trying to recoup their fees. I blame ACOG. Every time I think of them, I think of Scrooge McDuck sitting on a pile of coins." An item in the January 1995 issue of Sports Licensing International reveals just how grand ACOP's delusions were. "ACOP believes pins will achieve and surpass the status of the trading card as the industry's top collectible," the newsletter reported. "The goal ... is to sell one pin per person in the U.S., or about 250 million pins." With Pin Society membership having topped out at 80,000, those drooling estimates will turn out to be pecan pie in the sky.
NOC Pins
Produced by the National Olympic Committees (NOC) of the participating nations. Usually are brought to the Games by athletes and officials. Some NOC pins are made available to the collecting public before the Games to raise funds for the respective national committees and their teams.
Collectibles, alas, require a measure of collectibility. A mass-produced collectible is an oxymoron. Yet ACOP has presided over the manufacture of some 40 million pins, authorizing more designs than were generated for all previous Summer Games combined.
All of this has my fellow pinheads kvetching volubly. Every licensee but Balfour—as a ring manufacturer, it's concentrating on high-end, jewelry-quality pins, including a five-item, $50,000 set available (mercifully) in limited quantities—seems to have struck its own 342-Days-until-Izzy-Boots-Up-His-IBM-on-Thanksgiving-with-a-Torch-in-His-Hand pin, lest a sliver of market share be lost. In this rush, dealers report that not all manufacturers are hewing to the highest standards of quality. And while those pins that are well-made tend, thanks to newfangled laser-lettering and resin processes, to be as bright and shiny as ever, bright and shiny isn't the lone standard by which collectors judge a pin. "I remember in '84 how many people said that pins are beautiful, that each is unique," says Leonard from L.A. "It's hard to say that now. They're really kind of all the same."
Sport-Federation Pins
Specific to individual sports of the Games and are produced and distributed by the governing bodies of those sports (both international and national) and by the national teams participating in the Games.
In their zeal to attract newcomers, ACOP and Coke are overwhelming greenhorn hobbyists and disillusioning the veterans who thought they had a handle on what had been a manageable avocation. "My customers have lost interest from the onslaught," says one prominent pin retailer. "In 1984 you could actually collect everything. Now people aren't even starting. The truth is, it's bad business. The people who came up with New Coke must have been shifted over to pins."
Worst of all, the marketing M.B.A.'s have trampled on the heretofore sacred ground of NOC pins. Coca-Cola struck deals with 74 national Olympic committees to design, create and market their pins. Most longtime NOC collectors disdain these soulless items, all produced by the same manufacturer. But it's a regrettable development for another reason: Many of the Olympic committees that have signed up with Coke represent impoverished nations like Burundi and Equatorial Guinea, places where sports officials no doubt believed that the masterful American marketers could generate a windfall for their coffers. But each NOC collects only a $1 royalty on every $10 pin sold. Even if Coke sells out its inventory of a country's design, the committee will collect barely enough to pay for a few office supplies and phone calls.
"The whole thing has several parallels with baseball cards," says Leonard from L.A. "Once it was a hobby, where people traded with each other. Now it's a business with so much overproduction that everything's become worthless."
"Atlanta will be pin collecting's high point," adds a longtime hobbyist. "And the beginning of the end."
The end has already come for me. Henceforth, when I have Georgia on my mind, I will think of the state playing host to the '96 Games, not of a spare white circle with inscrutable lettering on flat enamel. Before I get strangled on a dangle, before I go a bridge pin too far, before I hang not my sunglasses but my own sorry self on a Spec-Tacular pin, I'm slipping the surly bonds of a butterfly-clutch tackback and bidding the hobby adieu.
You can take this pin and stick it.
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