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