Meet Atlanta’s Olympic Pin Collectors

Once a month, the back room of Manuel’s Tavern is closed.

On the third Monday of the month, the room is rented by a group of Olympic pin collectors. Officially, the meeting starts at 5 p.m., but very little is official about the club, and many members show up early to set up. The tables are covered with corkboards on which hundreds of pins are gently arranged. Some carry sheets of cardboard with similar arrangements. Others have large bins filled with myriad pins they have received over the years, for sale at low prices.

The room is more crowded than usual: unofficial leader Scott Reed posted a rally notice on Facebook inviting anyone attending the Paris Olympics to come.

Reed gives them official Paris Olympic badges to take with them, and one member gives them bags of free badges from the collection of his brother, who died last year. As one member said, you should not buy your departure badges in Paris. It is better to take them with you.

“The core group here is our normal monthly pin traders,” Reed told Rough Draft. “Probably two-thirds of the people here, I’ve never met them before… It’s just nice to meet people who can’t wait to go.”

Meet the collectors

Reed began collecting pins at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. His employer at the time, NationsBank, was an Olympic sponsor and created pins commemorating their partnership for employees. Reed found out who was in charge of distributing the pins and asked for more. He received a bag of 50 and went to the Varsity, thinking no one would be interested in trading him for such common pins.

“I thought no one would want the NationsBank pins, they’re so common,” Reed told Rough Draft. “I might have to trade five pins to get one.” To my pleasant surprise, I realized that people were willing to trade me a pin for a pin. From there, it snowballed. »

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This is a relatively common origin story among members.

Sean Stowers worked for UPS during the 1996 Olympics and received a bag of pins shaped like delivery trucks from his boss, who told him he would be fired if he sold the pins. But he was allowed to exchange them.

Stowers went to the Olympic Village with a work friend, where he was immediately offered $100 for one of the pins. Stowers refused, not wanting to lose his job. Instead, he traded two pins for an Olympic Starter jacket (similar to this one) that the seller was selling at the time for $150. His friend Scott, his boss Curtis, and Curtis’ wife did the same. The group quickly realized they were hungry, so they stopped in front of a food truck, where the vendor had a small sheet of cardboard with pins on it.

“I said, ‘Hey, if I give you this truck (pin), are you going to take care of our meal and this family of four behind us?’ ” Stowers told Rough Draft during the meeting. “And he was like, ‘Yeah!’ »

Stowers eventually amassed a large collection of UPS pins from the 1996 Olympics. When the 2000 Sydney Olympics took place, he sold the collection for $3,800 (today about $7,000) to a another collector and used this money to finance his stay in Sydney. Since then, he has traveled to every Olympic Games. And for the most part, he didn’t buy his own beer.

“My buddy and I – my buddy who passed away (in 2015), we had an agreement that if one of us bought a beer at the Olympics, we would have to give the other $100,” Stowers laughed.

One of the secrets of the Pin trading community is the level of access you can get through Pin trading. Everyone in the club has a story about getting free food or a hotel room through pin trading. Tickets are a special commodity because most Olympic volunteers receive free tickets to events but can’t attend many of them, meaning they’re willing to trade pins for tickets. It takes charm and a good idea of ​​the value of pins, but it’s relatively easy to do if you meet the right people.

Stowers and Reed have more access to the Olympics than most pin collectors. This is because they design pins for different countries. Reed designed a country pin for this year (he asked Rough Draft not to release the country until the pin was released), and although Stowers did not design a pin for these Olympic Games, he is working with North Macedonia on several projects. and has designed pins in the past for Bermuda, Lesotho and Albania, among others. His favorite design was that of Dominica, which features parrots with movable wings.

“When I first started making pins, it was because athletes would come to me and say, ‘You probably don’t want that one, it’s not very pretty,'” Stowers said. “And it broke my heart. This is their moment in history. This pin is an extension of themselves, it’s a representation of their team and their country, and they have stupid things to be ashamed of. So I started reaching out to some countries and saying, “Hey, let me do something nice for you.” »

But what Stowers really gains from designing pins is being put on the list of people allowed into the Olympic Village. This is where he meets athletes and interacts with them, which allows him to make even more contacts. Stowers also gets copies of the pins to trade.

Country pins are some of the most valuable pins since they are only given to athletes. In fact, the prize of Reed’s collection is his complete set of national pins from the 1996 Olympics. Over several years, Reed managed to acquire the athlete badge of every country participating in those Games. Most serious collectors prioritize one type of pin – Coca-Cola pins, athlete pins, etc. – and try to find as many as possible.

But more than the pins, it’s the community created and the friendships made along the way.

“The real fun of collecting pins isn’t in the pins themselves,” Reed said. “I like looking at them… But it’s not the pin itself, but rather the memories attached to the pins, because there was some kind of specific interaction where I got the pins. Especially if it was a pin that I got during the Games, there was an interaction with someone else in the world that I met on the street, I talked to them, I exchanged the pin and had a short, pleasant interaction with them. …I literally have pin trading friends all over the world, and I can travel anywhere in the world and have someone that I can let know that I’m coming, and I can meet them there- down and say hi to them… That social aspect, and the memories related to the friends I made is for me the best part of collecting pins and the reason I still do it, rather than just taking what I got to Atlanta and stopping there.

Reed has scheduled meetings with dozens of people in Paris and plans to meet even more people this time. But before he leaves, pin collectors have one last meeting on July 15 at Manuel’s Tavern. It’s the farewell reunion for those heading to Paris, and Reed will bring his Olympic torch from the Atlanta Olympics.