A few years ago Bud Kling added three rooms to his house in the Pacific Palisades, California. The builders used additional concrete together with a reinforcing metal beam – and not because Mr. Kling was expecting a crowd. The rooms weren’t for people. They were designed to house and display his 30,000-strong collection of Olympic pins, the colorful and infinitely diverse souvenirs that have been bought and traded at the Games for decades.
Even when the builders were finished, Mr Kling, a 74-year-old tennis coach, had far more pins than he could fit into his house. He also owns roughly 100,000 “trade pins” – multiples of the same pin that can be traded – and he drags some of them to games. His stash is stacked in his garage and rented storage rooms.
“I have a very patient wife,” said Mr. Kling unnecessarily.
When the organizers of the Tokyo Olympics announced that the 2020 Games would be delayed by a year and that no overseas spectators would be allowed into the country in March, few were as desperate as Mr Kling and other die-hard Olympic pin dealers. For them, the games are only partly about sports. For every minute they spend watching contests, they spend a minute – maybe two – with trading needles, either in impromptu scrums outside of venues or in specific trading hubs.
The collapse of the pin trading market is unlikely to be reflected in the loss list for the Tokyo Games, a company that, according to the country’s organizers, will cost more than $ 15 billion. About $ 3 billion of that came from contract renegotiations caused by years of delay. But filling the national coffers hasn’t been the hosting’s goal since the price of throwing the world’s largest gathering began to rise more than a decade ago. The countries vie for the games and hope for the ultimate look-at-me moment, a nifty, multi-week advertisement aimed at the entire planet.
Tokyo will get a healthy chunk of self-promotion when the Games happen, which organizers vowed despite national polls suggesting an overwhelming number of people in Japan – who are grappling with an extended fourth wave of the virus – another delay or would prefer total delay cancellation.
For Olympic goers around the world, these games will be remembered as the party they had to skip. These include around 250 pin dealers, people who plan their lives in the two years between the Summer Olympics and the Winter Olympics.
Never heard of Olympic pins? They are a portable, portable piece of advertising and branding for sports delegations, national Olympic committees, corporate sponsors, news media, and cities competing for the Games. (The New York Times makes its own pins and gives reporters covering events a few dozen.)
For the unmoved, the pens are the kind of $ 7 keepsake you toss in a drawer or trash once you get back from games. Thousands of people buy pins and many act spontaneously as soon as they see a trading stick outside of a venue. The host countries cater to both casual and avid fans by producing large quantities of pins that are sold in souvenir shops.
Japan was prepared for crazy crowds. The country’s organizers have made 600 different officially licensed pins, a spokesman for the games said, and there are 12 souvenir shops in Tokyo. The demand for this bounty is an open question. It’s not just that Japanese fans are the only ones allowed into the games. Trading is such a hands-on, face-to-face activity that there are fears that it could be discouraged or even banned.
The press office at the games would not comment on anything other than sending a “game book” published in February with security protocols. There was no mention of pin trading, but one of the principles was that participants “should keep physical interactions with others to a minimum” and “avoid closed spaces and crowds whenever possible”. That makes pin trading as good as impossible.
Coca-Cola, a long-time Olympic sponsor, has been building pin trading centers on the grounds of the games for years. A spokeswoman said there would be pin-related promotions, including the ability to purchase pins representing Japan’s 47 prefectures. Whether the company will open and host a pin trading center in Tokyo is still being examined.
For years, Mr. Kling has been recruited by Coca-Cola to help monitor and manage its pin trading centers. This voluntary position made him the unofficial pin tsar of the games. His many responsibilities include enforcing etiquette and unwritten rules. This means ensuring that the tables are shared fairly, that counterfeit pens are weeded out, and that newcomers are not cluttered.
“Occasionally I hear an older man say to a child, ‘My pin is a lot bigger so you’ll have to trade me two for it,'” he said. “We don’t want anyone grinding an 8-year-old.”
Some are there for the money. There are more than 80,000 eBay listings for Olympic pins. Those speculators had a golden moment in Nagano, Japan, in 1998 when the organizers were not producing enough pins for reasons no one ever explained. A trading frenzy ensued. Some people made $ 40,000 in a few days. The pin economy had a tulip-mad moment.
“Guy I know made a down payment on his house with money he made in Nagano,” said Sid Marantz, a pin dealer who has participated in 17 Olympics and another regular volunteer in Coca-Cola -Pin trading centers is.
At the age of 76, Mr. Marantz left a family business that sells food ingredients such as salt and sugar. He got his first pin when his parents took him to Rome for the 1960 Olympics. He was a huge fan of Rafer Johnson, a UCLA all-rounder who won gold in the decathlon that year.
“I just got carried away with the whole thing,” he said.
He attended his next games in 1976 in Montreal on a Track & Field News tour to which he subscribed. This is the first time that viewers have dealt with the pin trade on a large scale.
It’s an affordable hobby, at least in the skilled hands of Mr. Marantz. He estimates his entire collection cost him about $ 10,000. In large part, this is because after the 1996 Atlanta Games he and three friends found out about a warehouse in Colorado that houses the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committees and that is filled with 750,000 unsold pens. They put in $ 35,000 and bought the entire property. Each of them kept about 40,000 pins and sold the rest to pin collectors around the world.
“We called it Motherlode,” he said of the takeover. “It means I go to games with pins that really don’t cost me anything. Therefore, I will trade with absolutely everyone. “
Pin trading isn’t just about making new friends, it’s also about finding obscure, hard-to-find treasures. This includes pins from African delegations as they tend to set up small teams. (Burundi’s pins are particularly valued; the country brought nine athletes to Rio in 2016.) Every country that recently changed its name is in the crosshairs of pin dealers. That said, you, North Macedonia, which will compete in its first games since Greece, have forced it to add “North” to its name.
The lapel pins of Japanese media companies have been in demand since Nagano because they are often adorned with cute cartoon mascots. This time around, not even that genre is going to be hot. Pins from Tokyo 2020 – yes, it keeps the name no matter the actual date – will be worth next to nothing, Marantz predicts. Supply will flood demand.
Both Mr. Marantz and Mr. Kling had bought tickets to events in Tokyo worth thousands of dollars, money that has since been refunded. It was only recently that they accepted that they really weren’t going to be going to Japan in a couple of weeks. On Friday, the Japanese government extended the state of emergency in Tokyo and other prefectures until at least June 20.
“It’s like a boulder falling,” said Mr Kling when he was forced to skip the games, “and hit you in the head.”
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