Aficionados of Olympic Pins Are Out for Blood in Trading Frenzy

The young man looked over Jeff Morgan’s Olympic pins spread out for sale or trade, swooned as one caught his eye, and pulled out a card.

“ Cambio , cambio ,” he pleaded for a trade.

Morgan of Granada Hills looked over the card and gave the dealer’s standard oh-go-ahead-and-take-me nod of approval. The young man happily got the pin he wanted. And Morgan had the guy’s weekly bus pass.

It is not all that uncommon a sight around Barcelona, as pins have become a type of international currency that can be dealt for money, beer, food, newspapers and other items as well as yet more pins.

But pin trading has been less prominent than at other recent Olympics, largely because of a cool reception by local authorities.

Morgan said he and several partners invested in 24,000 pins and headed for Barcelona, only to run into the Policia Nacional.

“It was like dealing drugs. You had to send a guy off around the corner to make the transaction,” Morgan said.

Morgan and others who sell pins for cash have been run out of trading locales and had their wares confiscated. They got them back after much trouble, payment of a small fee and discouraging words about setting up again.

The traders blamed Coca-Cola, which runs the main Olympic pin trading center.

But Coke folk say they had nothing to do with the crackdown, that they don’t care about deals for money as long as they are done outside the tent, reserved for pin-for-pin transactions.

The tent is visited by about 5,000 traders a day.

Olympic pin trading went on quietly for many years as athletes, officials and media traded identification pins. But collecting became a craze in Los Angeles in 1984, with scores of Olympic-related organizations and businesses putting their names on them.