Things have been pretty quiet lately with regard to both authentic and unauthorized NOC pins, but that is about to change. The clock is ticking down to the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia – as of today, there are only 35 days until the Opening Ceremonies. Most of the NOCs have completed or are close to completing their Olympic trials and will be outfitting their teams in the next three weeks.

According to Wikipedia, 86 nations have qualified at least one athlete for the Sochi Olympics. While not all of these nations may choose to attend, it looks like there will be slightly more NOCs in Sochi than were in Vancouver. This should mean plenty of authorized NOC pins to collect.

As we have been saying for some time, it is much easier to spot the unauthorized NOC pins if you know which ones are authorized. With that in mind, we have been working hard to acquire images of as many authorized pins as possible. Some of these are pins available for sale that we’ve discussed previously. These images have all been uploaded to our website. So too have images of the few new NOC pins that have been produced for Sochi that have shown up on eBay or other auction sites. But we have also been acquiring images of authorized pins that are not yet in circulation either directly from NOCs or from pin producers. We do not want to give anyone enough time to produce counterfeits of these pins so we have been holding onto these images. But this is about to change. On January 15th, we will go live with theses images. So be sure to tune in then. In the meantime, if you happen to see a pin that is not listed, please send the image to us at Illegal_Pin_Comm@comcast.net. And as always,

Stay tuned!

Steve

On behalf of the members of the Olympin Committee on Unauthorized NOC pins, I’d like to welcome you to our blog. My name is Steve Robie. I am the chairman of the committee – this was my punishment for saying out loud that someone should do something about all of these fake NOC pins.   😉   Joining me on the committee are (in no particular order): Pete Wade, Sid Marantz, Mohan Banerji, Bud Kling, John Kinnaman and Daniel Beniston. Between us, we have more than 150 years of experience collecting Olympic memorabilia. We all share a love of the Olympics and a desire to clean up one of the uglier areas of the Olympic movement. It is our hope that by making it a little safer for new collectors, we can continue to grow the hobby that we love.

We encourage you use the Background, Glossary of Terms and FAQ links on our website. These documents will help to explain how our committee was formed, what we are trying to do and explain the terminology that we are using.

We also encourage you to contact us either by posting comments to our blog or by email at Illegal_Pin_Comm@comcast.net. Who knows, we might even figure out these Facebook and Twitter things!

Best regards,

Steve Robie