Team USA is currently in Rio competing to take home as many medals as possible, but there’s another way to strike gold at the Olympic Games: pin trading. What started out at the 1896 games in Athens as a way to identify athletes, judges, and officials has morphed into an integral part of the Olympic experience.
As you walk around the Olympic Park from stadium to stadium, you’ll see vendors set up with pins on display and covering every square inch their hats and lanyards. Every year brings a slew of different pin designs from a wide variety of sources, but surprisingly many of these pins aren’t for sale. The only way to get the pins you truly want is to trade.
Olympic pin trading is more than just a hobby that the pin-heads (as they’re lovingly called) engage in. Volunteers trade pins with media members, media members swap pins with athletes, athletes exchange with media members, and media members barter with event attendees. Even for those who go to one event only, it’s undeniably difficult to resist the the excitement of scouring through pin collections and bartering. Pin trading may come from the sheer desire to get a particular pin or to even trade for an event ticket, but most take part because they simply enjoy it.
As Tim Jamieson, a collector with 30,000 pins and counting told The New York Times,
