Today, we come to the end of our series describing the various types of unauthorized NOC pins. While the first three categories ( counterfeits, outlaws and renegades ) are the most common, there are two more categories to discuss: backdoor and ambush pins.

A backdoor NOC pin is a pin produced by over-manufacturing a legitimate NOC pin. Typically, a NOC or person authorized by a NOC will design an Olympic pin and then place an order with a manufacturer for the production of the pin. Besides the design, the production order will specify the quantity of pins being ordered. While a lot of factors go into the decision of how many pins to produce, this number ultimately determines whether a pin will be common or scarce.

Unfortunately, some unethical manufacturers have produced additional pins of designs that they believe will be popular for their own benefit. These are backdoor pins. Since they are produced in the same factory with the same mold, they are indistinguishable from the original, legitimate pins. So how can you avoid these pins? One way is to look at who is selling these pins. You will find that the dealers who are selling other types of unauthorized NOC pins will have these as well. Another way is to notice when a pin that should be scarce appears to be quite common. Some manufacturers put production totals on their pins – for example:

You may recognize this as one of the infamous Somalia animal outlaw pins, but the point is still valid. The backstamp indicates that 200 of these pins were produced. This should make this pin extremely hard to find. If this were a legitimate NOC pin, many NOC collectors worldwide would be trying to add this pin to their collections. How many of these pins should be left after everyone who wants one has added it to their collections? The answer should be none, or at most a few. Yet these pins show up on eBay week after week, month after month. Clearly the number of available pins must be greater than the 200 indicated. It is exactly the same in the case of backdoor NOC pins; the supply of these pins is greater than it should be.

The second type of pin I’d like to discuss is the ambush pin. Technically, these pins are legal because no registered games marks (rings, logos, mascots, etc.) are used. The goal of these pins is to trick the collector into thinking that they are Olympic pins. The most common ambush pins are sponsor pins – a company wants to make it look like they are an Olympic sponsor without actually sending the IOC any money. For example, there were many Starbuck pins in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Starbucks was not (and is not) a sponsor of the International Olympic Committee or either the United States or Canadian National Olympic Committees, so why were all of these pins appearing? Because they wanted to increase their sales to all of the Olympic spectators in Vancouver without having to pay a lot of money to be an official sponsor.

I have not personally seen an example of an ambush NOC pin, but I can suggest a couple possible scenarios. Imagine that an Olympic athlete sees all of the Olympic pin trading going on in the Olympic Village and on the street and wants to get involved. But there is a problem – her NOC did not produce any NOC pins for this Olympics. While walking through town, she spots a store owned by an émigré from her country and goes in. There she finds that the store owner has produced some small pins with two crossed flags: his homeland’s flag and his new home’s flag. The athlete purchases a bunch of these pins and goes back to the Olympic Village to get in on the pin trading. The pin was clearly not produced to be an NOC pin, but the athlete is using it as if it were one.

This is a fairly innocent situation if the athlete is just trying to enjoy the atmosphere within the Olympic Village. Now imagine that a long-time NOC collector decides to produce similar crossed flag pins with one flag being the Olympic host nation and the other flag being a variety of some of the more obscure Olympic nations. His goal is to make it appear that these are the only pins that these NOCs produced and trade them for authentic NOC pins. Since the flags are in the public domain, the pins are legal, but producing them for the purpose of fooling other collectors to benefit himself is clearly unethical.

Avoiding ambush NOC pins should be fairly easy. It is very uncommon for an authorized NOC pin not to include some registered games mark like the Olympic rings because the NOC is legally allowed to use them. So, if someone offers you a “NOC” pin with no games marks, just say no.

This concludes our series of posts about the different types of unauthorized NOC pins. I hope that they have given you a better idea of what unauthorized pins are out there and some ways to avoid being taken advantage of.

Next time we’ll discuss the process our committee uses to discover unauthorized NOC pins and get the information to collectors. Stay tuned.

Steve