DATELINE: Albertville

“Peenz? You have peenz?”

You here it everywhere here at the Winter Olympics. Pin-trading and collecting are as much a part of the scene in the Savoy region of France as they were at the Los Angeles Summer Games in 1984.

But the state of the art has advanced. Pin-swapping here need not be a catch-as-catch-can thing. There still are plenty of people stopping strangers on the street or at the venues and getting right into it, language differences aside. But there also is Coca-Cola’s Official Olympic Pin Trading Centre, which gives a trader a chance to step in out of the weather, step up to a trading table and see if his Roni Raccoon from Lake Placid will get him Misha, the Russian bear from the 1980 Moscow Summer Games.

The trading center makes no such boast, but it probably could bill itself as the world’s largest pin swap meet under canvas, since it is, basically, a long tent. Mixed in with other Olympic-related ventures near the speedskating rink and figure skating arena in Albertville, it is easy to find. And there is no admission fee.

Polly Howes of Atlanta runs the operation and has been here for a month but still finds it a little hard to believe.

“This pin-trading thing--I didn’t realize that pins would become my life,” she said. “The pins are bigger than all of us now.”

The center here will be open only through Sunday’s closing ceremony, but then, for Howes, it’s on to Barcelona for preliminary work on the Summer Games.

“I’m going (there) before I even get to go home,” she said.

Before then, though, she expects more pin action than a busy bowling alley.

“On busy days, we probably have several thousand people in here,” she said. “And recognizing the decentralized nature of the Games here, we also have two mobile pin centers and we’re going to hit every venue with them at least once. It’s a little van. The back opens and out pop some trading tables.

“We also have two smaller centers, one in (downtown) Albertville and one in Meribel.

“We have regulars now that have sort of set up camp here, and as long as they let everyone get a chance to trade and some access to the tables, it’s fun to have them.”

It’s trading that the center promotes, not buying and selling.

“We are offering a number of pins . . . for sale to help seed the trading process because some people come to the Games and don’t have any pins,” she said. “They’re just getting started and want a base to trade with.

“But (at the trading tables) we don’t allow money to change hands. We have people monitoring the tables.”

Plenty of pins change hands, though, and for serious Olympic collectors, this is the place to be.

As Howes said: “The pin thing keeps getting bigger. It’s the spectator sport of the Olympics.”