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Olympic pin traders

Reuters

Getting to his feet after talking for 20 minutes about the pin collection he hopes to trade at the 2024 Olympics, 86-year-old Ross Baxter jokes that he is getting too old for his hobby.It has taken in 14 Olympics and made him many friends along the way, many of whom are in Paris over the next fortnight.Born in Scotland but now living in Canada, Baxter began collecting after he was a volunteer at the Calgary Winter Olympics and was handed a badge by the Chinese Taipei team after driving them for the day. From that moment he was hooked.&quot;It&#x27;s addictive,&quot; he said. &quot;It&#x27;s like if you start collecting anything, however it is, this is the same thing. But this to me is a lot of fun. Because you go to another country, you meet a lot of nice people, and that&#x27;s what makes it, you know, I could collect coins, stuff like that. That would not be fun. You just go into a store.&quot;Pins - and trading them - are now an integral part of any games, with hundreds available at Paris 2024 from NOCs, sporting federations, media companies, sponsors and the city authorities.Baxter has a collection from each of the games he has attended at home, but has brought many of his duplicates to France so he can trade them for pins associated with this year&#x27;s Games.But compared to his friend Dan Presburger, he is a mere part-timer.Presburger, a teacher from Los Angeles, arrived in Paris with 75kg of pins in his luggage, and hopes to swap thousands of them during his stay to bolster his collection which is already into the hundreds of thousands.Pin collecting became popular at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and since then has grown with each Olympics, and between 100 and 150 traders will be in operation outside the athletes&#x27; village once the games begin.Although Presburger got the bug at the LA games, he has a pin from 1908 and is searching for earlier examples, while Baxter said even the ancient games 5,000 years ago had a forerunner of pins with competitors exchanging wooden keepsakes.Some pins have little value and are useful only as swaps, others are worth between $15 and $50 while rare ones will fetch up to $1,000 on ebay.Presburger says the money he makes on resales will help pay for his trip to Paris, as well as tickets for various events he will go to with his girlfriend and son.&quot;I was a coin collector, I was at the Olympics in 1984, I was 20 years old in college, and I couldn&#x27;t afford to buy coins anymore,&quot; he said.&quot;But these are a couple of dollars each. What I did is I went out and traded and got a good one, and then I traded that one for 20 or 30 pins, and I traded those and built up.&quot;Each Olympics, he explained, throws up a rare pin or two that everyone is chasing, although he admitted he doesn&#x27;t yet know what &#x27;the one&#x27; will be for Paris 2024.The athletes&#x27; village is a fertile hunting ground, with hundreds of competitors milling around outside, many of them willing to trade pins to build up their own collection.As the Olympics progresses, Presburger will move around venues to meet as many different collectors as possible, and says gymnastics is somewhere he always tries his luck because it is often attended by VIPs who have hard-to-get pins.(Production: Joyce Zhou, Iain Axon)<div> </div><div> </div><div> </div>

Pins - and trading them - are now an integral part of any games, with hundreds available at Paris 2024 from NOCs, sporting federations, media companies, sponsors and the city authorities.

Pins - and trading them - are now an integral part of any games, with hundreds available at Paris 2024 from NOCs, sporting federations, media companies, sponsors and the city authorities.

Meet the Olympic pin traders boosting their collections in Paris

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Meet the Olympic pin traders boosting their collections in Paris

Reuters

Published Jul 25, 2024 04:27 PM PHT

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