Before we get into the meat of this blog, we’d like to pause to remember John Kinnaman, who passed away last week. If he were here, John would be the first to admit that his position as a founding member of our committee was a complete accident. John was one of the first people to volunteer to join our committee because he thought that we would be covering all types of unauthorized Olympic memorabilia, not just NOC pins. But rather than quit when he realized that we were going in a different direction, he stayed and provided invaluable feedback from the point-of-view of a non-NOC expert that helped start us off in the right direction. Even more importantly, as organizer for the Olympin show in Chicago, he understood the importance of what we were doing and decided to ask our committee to speak at the annual banquet; further increasing our visibility within the club. He will be missed.

There are now only 75 days remaining until the start of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.  If Vancouver is any indication, approximately 80 NOCs will enter teams and most will have NOC pins to trade. In addition, a number of fraudsters will be present trying to trick the collecting public into purchasing or trading legitimate pins for their “creations”. We suspect that most of the illegitimate pins are put into circulation either right before the start of the Games or shortly thereafter so it is critical to identify the illegitimate pins as soon as possible to protect collectors and prevent the fraudsters from profiting from them.

Trying to identify all of the NOC pins and separate the legitimate from the illegitimate will be our group of five intrepid committee members. How can so few do so much in so little time? That is a question that we have spent most of the last year thinking about. Our strategy is to identify as many of the legitimate NOC pins as possible prior to the start of the Olympics so that our committee members in Sochi can focus on a smaller number of unknown pins. Currently we are:

1) Contacting pin producers – While we know that most of the legitimate NOC pins are produced by small companies within each country, there are still a fair number that are produced by larger organizations like Honav, Kingdom Pins, Trofe, Aminco and Laurie Artiss. We have been in contact with these companies and have arrangements with at least one to provide images of their Sochi NOC pins prior to the start of the Olympics.

2) Contacting NOCs – Likewise, we have been contacting NOCs directly asking for images of their pins for Sochi and have gotten at least one positive response so far. Next month, we will follow up the emails with letters to the NOCs to try to get either their pins or images of them.

3) Watching eBay auctions – We are constantly monitoring eBay for auctions of new NOC pins.

When a new pin is identified, we put the image onto our website: http://www.olympinclub.com/nocpins_search.php, usually within 24 hours and send off an email to the NOC in question asking whether the pin is legitimate.

So far, we have posted images of 90 newly identified NOC pins. Perhaps a quarter of these are from a group of likely unauthorized generic NOC pins that appear to have originated in China. Another large group of these pins are pins produced by Honav/USA for the US Olympic Committee and available for sale on the USOC website (such as this one):

We expect that at least another 100 pins will turn up between now and the conclusion of the Games. Will we be able to get them loaded onto our database and authenticated in real-time? I don’t know, but we are certainly going to try. In her book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, Hilary Clinton talked about the significant impacts that groups outside the family can have on child development. I would argue that it also takes a community of collectors to combat unauthorized NOC pins. While we will do our best, receiving help from people outside our committee can make the difference between success and failure. How can you help? Keep checking on our website. If you see a pin that we don’t have, whether you believe that it is legitimate or not, take a picture of it and send it to us at Illegal_Pin_Comm@comcast.net. If you don’t want to buy or trade for the pin in question, just ask the owner if you can photograph it and tell them that you are trying to document all of the existing NOC pins for Sochi. The sooner we can get images of all the NOC pins in Sochi online, the sooner collectors can make informed decisions about whether to buy or trade for a particular pin. Thank you in advance for any help that you can provide and, as always, stay tuned.

Steve