Monthly Archives: September 2013

Where is Abkhazia and what does it have to do with unauthorized NOC pins?

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Where is Abkhazia and what does it have to do with unauthorized NOC pins? Can you guess? First, beside being the answers to a National Geographic trivia question, the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia are disputed territories along the border between Georgia and Russia in the vicinity of Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics. I won’t go too deeply into the history, but both of these areas were semiautonomous regions within Georgia before and after the end of the Soviet Union. You may recall that Russia and Georgia fought a short, very one-sided war in 2008 when both republics broke away from Georgia and Russia prevented the Georgian military from reasserting control.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with unauthorized NOC pins? There are two parts to the answer. First, this week, the IOC reacted strongly to news that the Russian NOC had listed both territories in a database of countries eligible to take part in the Sochi Winter Olympics. Here is what they said:

“The IOC currently recognizes 204 National Olympic Committees,” an IOC official told      Insidethegames.

“As stated in the Olympic Charter, ‘they have the exclusive authority for the representation of their respective countries at the Olympic Games and at the regional, continental or world multi-sports competitions patronized by the IOC’.

“To be eligible for participation in the Olympic Games a competitor must be entered by his NOC as recognized by the IOC.

“The IOC does recognize an NOC for Georgia (which has jurisdiction over the whole territory of Georgia) but does not recognize an NOC for Abkhazia or South Ossetia.”

The recognition of a new NOC requires, among other things, that it be recognized as a country by the international community. To date, these territories have been recognized by five countries: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Tuvalu – a very interesting list, but only about 2.5% of the international community.

The second part of the answer is that “new” NOCs are a frequent target for producers of unauthorized NOC pins. Why? Because if you are a collector of NOC pins, wouldn’t you want the first pin produced by a new NOC? From the pin producer’s point-of-view, if there is no actual NOC, then there is no one except the IOC to hassle them about their pins. Here is an example from a few years ago:

Eritrea_Generic_Flag_Front

Eritrea, in East Africa along the Red Sea, won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after more than 30 years of struggle. The Eritrean NOC was founded in 1996 and was recognized by the IOC in 1999. Shortly after that, this pin started appearing. There was only one problem: there are only a handful of NOCs that have their national flag as the NOC logo, and Eritrea was not one of them. Flags are common vehicles for these bogus “first NOC” pins because their designs are widely distributed.

Another of these “new NOC” pins appeared in London:

South_Sudan_Generic_Flag_Front

to take advantage of the fact that the IOC allowed marathon runner Guor Marial from the new country of South Sudan to take part in the Summer Olympics under the Olympic flag. There was just one small problem: as of the start of the London Olympic, there was no South Sudan NOC. This is why Guor marched into the Olympic Stadium under the Olympic Flag and not the flag of South Sudan. The story from people trading or selling this pin was that it was to publicize the new country and Guor’s attendance in London. That might even be true. However, as we have mentioned earlier, only the IOC and the NOCs are permitted to use the Olympic rings logo. That makes this pin illegal no matter who produced it.

So don’t be surprised if someone turns up selling or trading a new NOC pin from Abkhazia during the Sochi Winter Olympic Games. It will just be the latest in a long line of similar bogus pins.

Stay tuned until next time.

Steve

Stay tuned until next time.

Steve

Odds and Ends

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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:

Somalia_London_Monkey_Back

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

 

 

 

Renegade NOC pins

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In the last two posts, we’ve covered two types of unauthorized pins that are quite clear; counterfeits because they can be compared with an original authentic NOC pin and outlaw pins where the producer has no relationship with the NOC in question. In both cases, the perpetrator is out to personally benefit, either by trading the pin for an authorized one or by selling it to the unsuspecting. Today, we are going to discuss another category where things are much less clear: renegade NOC pins.

The definition of renegade that we are using here is someone who rejects his cause or faith for another. In the context of NOC pins, a renegade pin is one that is produced by someone who is at least loosely affiliated with the NOC in question, but is not authorized to produce pins for the NOC. This description already indicates some of the difficulties in identifying a renegade NOC pin. First, we have to discover the person who is producing the pin. If they are, in fact, affiliated with the NOC, then we have to determine whether that person is authorized to produce NOC pins for his/her NOC. The second step is difficult because the organizational structure of each NOC is unique and is generally not known to the outside world. For some of the smaller NOCs, the entire NOC may consist of 2-3 members: a President, Secretary General (SecGen) and perhaps a Chef de Mission. In this case, there are only a couple of choices for who produces a pin and who is authorized to produce a pin. But in a larger NOC, like the USOC, where there are hundreds of employees, we may not know who is authorized to produce pins or even how widely distributed this information is across the organization. Perhaps some examples will make this a little clearer.

Our first example is this one:

Mexico_Diving_Front

This pin demonstrates why we said that the producer has to be “loosely affiliated with the NOC”, because this pin was produced by the father of one of the Mexican divers. No matter what the organizational structure of the Mexican NOC is, it is clear that this guy was not authorized to produce a pin that uses the Olympic rings. That makes this pin illegal – only the IOC and NOCs may authorize pins using the Olympic rings. But unlike the professional fraudster who is only doing this for personal gain, his motives were not clear. He may have been looking to benefit from his child’s experience or he may have just wanted to have some pins for his family to trade to celebrate their child’s Olympic experience.

In the case of the Mexican Diving pin, it was clear that the producer was not authorized to produce this pin, but in our next example, this is not so clear.

Slovakia_2014_white

The producer of this Slovak delegation badge for Sochi is reported to be…sorry, I can’t tell you that. 😉 Let’s just say that he/she is a Slovak NOC employee. If you ask this person, he/she will tell you that these badges, which come in white, blue and red, are authentic. He/she has apparently produced similar badges for London and Vancouver. However, after seeing this pin on eBay, we sent an email to the Slovak NOC and were told that they did not produce this pin. This is the type of “he said/she said” argument that often occurs with renegade NOC pins. We certainly have to be careful who is responding to us because we have numerous cases where one group within an NOC does not know what another group is doing. But there are some other things that you can look at to identify a renegade NOC pin. The first one is to find out whether they are traded by the team. Since renegade pins are produced without approval, widespread distribution of the pins within the Olympic team is unlikely. In this case, the Slovak Olympic team members did not have these pins to trade. But the design of this pin is also questionable because it is very similar to a design that the Czech Republic NOC has been using since 1996. While the split of the former Czechoslovakia into the independent Slovakia and Czech Republic nations in 1993 was accomplished peacefully, it is very unlikely that the Slovak NOC would use the same design for their delegation badge.

Here is another example.

France_Coq_London

The French Coq (rooster for the non-francophones in the audience) was used for many years and was highly sought after by collectors. But after the Nagano Olympics in 1998, the Coq was retired and replaced by the very imaginative FRANCE logo. The story that we heard (and which we must admit may only be a story) is that this decision to change the logo infuriated some long-time French NOC staffers. One or more of these staffers literally went renegade and began producing at least a few French Coq pins for each Olympics since Nagano to keep alive the long tradition of these pins despite the official change in logo. While you might like the story, producing these pins without the authorization of the French NOC leadership makes these pins  as illegal as the Mexican Diving pin and the Slovak Delegation badge.

Finally, it is possible to find pins that are part renegade and part outlaw. This happens when an outlaw pin producer attempts to legitimize his/her pins by offering to supply a number of them at no cost to someone within a NOC. If the person accepting the pins is authorized to do so, then these pins suddenly become authorized – a huge benefit to the pin producer who likely held onto a bunch of the pins for his own use. But if the person accepting the pins is not authorized to accept them, then these pins become renegade pins.

Stay tuned for more information about unauthorized NOC pins.

Steve

Outlaw NOC Pins

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Outlaw. It is a term that conjures up images of the American Wild West. A single person against society. In a sense, this is appropriate because an outlaw NOC pin is a pin produced by someone with no connection with the NOC in question. It also implies someone who is breaking the law for personal gain. The NOC logos are the intellectual property of the NOC, the Olympic rings are the intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee and the Games marks of a particular Olympics are the intellectual property of the Olympic Organizing Committee in question. This use of any or all of these items is clearly against international law.

Unlike the counterfeit pins discussed previously, there is no attempt by the producer of outlaw pins to copy an existing legitimate pin.  These are completely new designs. At one point, we considered calling these fantasy pins, but this term seems to imply someone who is indulging their artistic skills, not a person who is breaking the law for personal gain.

Here is an example from the recent London Olympic Games:

Tanzania_London_Big_Ben_Front

King Kong NOC pins from Tanzania have been showing up since the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Identifying outlaw pins is often more difficult than identifying counterfeits because there are no legitimate pins to compare them to. The reverse side of the pin is often of no help either. Some outlaw pins have a backstamp while others don’t. The only case where the reverse side might help is when the legitimate pins from the NOC have a completely different reverse side design from the outlaw pins. Careful examination of the colors used on the pin (logo, rings) as well as the quality of the printing may also separate an outlaw pin from a legitimate pin.

But often the best clues come from the design. Going back to King Kong, why was this design selected? Primarily, because it is cute – one imagines that King Kong would have climbed Big Ben if he were in London rather than New York. And that is the point. Whether the fraudster plans to trade his outlaw pins for legitimate ones or sell the outlaw pins, either on the street or at an online auction site, the design has to be something that people would want. But if you think a little bit, there are all kinds of problems with this design. First, Wikipedia indicates that the original King Kong from the 1933 movie came from the mythical Skull Island in the Pacific Ocean, not from Tanzania or even from Africa. In addition, while gorillas do live in about 10 central African nations, they are not indigenous to Tanzania. So it is unlikely that anyone from Tanzania would come up with a design like this to publicize their team. It would be like putting a penguin on an American pin.

Here is another outlaw pin from London:

Jamaica_London_Crossed_Flags_Front

Flags are a common target for outlaw pin producers because “everyone knows what a country’s flag looks like”. Likewise, Jamaica was a likely target for outlaw producers because of all of the buzz about Usain Bolt. Again, just like legitimate pin producers, outlaw pin producers try to make designs that people want. But as in the case of King Kong, there are a couple details that point to this being an outlaw NOC pin. First, the United Kingdom flag is not quite right: the central red areas are too wide compared to the white borders. In addition, a “sister” pin with exactly the same design appeared for Pakistan; something that legitimate pin producers try to avoid doing.

All of this is not to say that NOCs only produce legitimate pins with designs that make sense. There are plenty of legitimate pins with nonsensical designs. However, by carefully examining a pin first rather than immediately jumping to “I want it”, you’ll be more likely to avoid the outlaws. And while we our committee is not volunteering to mount up and hunt down the outlaw pin producers, you can think of our website as a source for “Not Wanted” posters for outlaw pins.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Renegade NOC pins.

Steve