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Crowds going crazy for World Championships pins

Where to procure your pins

The Vail Valley Foundation is doing a pin every day of the Championships. Get them:

• On the flight deck in the finish stadium Red Tail, Beaver Creek

• At the Nations Race, Tues. Feb. 10, Golden Peak

• Beaver Creek Village next to the ice rink 30 minutes after the races

• At 6 p.m. in the expo tent between Solaris’ Championship Plaza and La Bottega in Vail Village.

Vail Daily pins

You can buy the Vail Daily’s pins at: The Daily building in Eagle-Vail, Luca Bruno in the Solaris, Lift Café inside the Westin, Colmar Lab near the Beaver Creek Covered Bridge and by the red Audi on display.

The history of pins

Since 1988 pin trading has been described as the Olympics’ No. 1 spectator sport, with thousands of designs, millions of individual pins and millions of collectors around the world.

With online auctions, you can find hard-to-find pins, and to keep in touch with other pin collectors.

1896 Athens: The first modern Olympics used small cardboard discs as colorful badges to identify the athletes (blue), judges (pink) and officials (red).

1904 St. Louis: the badges were now metal rather than cardboard and some were very ornate like jewelry.

1912 Stockholm: The first commercially produced pins were available for spectators. Pins were also advertised in the Games program as a form of fund raising. Up to this point, pin trading had not taken off.

1924 Paris: The first Olympic village allowed athletes and officials to mix more easily and therefore led to the swapping or trading of pins as a form of friendship and good will between nations.

1932 Los Angeles: The Great Depression meant that only two souvenir pins were available to the public, although there were athletes’ pins and officials pins.

1960 Squaw Valley: The first sponsor pin was available. It was produced by Sylvania Electric and showed a microphone and the Olympic rings.

1964 Innsbruck and Tokyo: Media pins became more available as the number of international television companies providing coverage increased.

1968 Mexico City: The modern form of pin clasp with the butterfly back became the norm.

1972 Munich: Hundreds of thousands of pin variations were produced and pin trading came out of the Olympic Village and spread to spectators.

1980 Lake Placid: The large number of pins available and the small size of the village meant that there were lots of pins to trade and lots of people to trade with. The perfect combination for pin trading to take off.

1984 Sarajevo: The first time a framed commemorative set of pins was produced. It was a 16 pin set of the mascot, Vuchko the wolf.

1984 Los Angeles: With perhaps 17 million pins in over 1,300 designs, pin trading was a major event at the LA Games. Large pin gatherings took place and the media reported on pin trading. Large numbers of counterfeit pins emerged with some trying to cash-in on the pin craze.

1988 Calgary: Some visitors arrived just for the pin trading rather than the Games. The third consecutive Games held in North America meant there were large numbers of traders. Coca-Cola set up the first official pin trading center.

Source: The Official Book of Olympic Games Pin Collecting

VAIL — Pin culture is growing like chrome-plated kudzu.

The 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships are here, and so are all kinds of people trading all kinds of commemorative pins.

Erin Boselli is the Pin Princess. Erin and Bob Boselli run Boselli’s, the official merchandiser for the entire World Championships event, and they’ve been at this for more than a year.



There’s a pin for each day, and the designs were a collaboration between Erin Boselli, the Vail Valley Foundation and the design firm Open Mind Studios.

“We knew we wanted to be involved with the Foundation. We’re excited for it to start,” Erin said.

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They came up for something for each day, and everything has the 2015 logo on it, which might seem to be pretty busy for something as small as a pin, but it isn’t.

All of the pins arrived late last week and they’re fabulous.

Media pins, too

Your Vail Daily caught a serious case of Pinsanity when it minted a 2014 Sochi Olympics pin featuring Mikaela Shiffrin. This year’s World Championships specialty Lindsey Vonn pin commemorates her record-breaking 63rd World Cup win and will be available on Feb. 11. It features the fair Lindsey celebrating her record-setting World Cup win in Cortina, Italy.

In Sochi, Shiffrin became the youngest gold medalist in Olympic alpine skiing history and got her own Vail Daily pin, which is not as good as multiple gold medals, but still pretty darned dandy.

“The Vail Daily’s globetrotting executive editor Ed Stoner traveled to the Sochi Olympics with a heart full of good intentions, and returned with a pocketful of pins,” said Mark Bricklin, the Vail Daily’s marketing guru.

For the World Championships, the Vail Daily has minted 15 of our own World Championships pins, which are seriously cool. Media pins are a time-honored tradition; the Wall Street Journal and New York Times proudly produced Olympic pins for Sochi, which were almost as popular as the Daily’s.

We don’t know where the NYT and the WSJ are selling theirs, but you can buy the Vail Daily’s pins at: The Daily building in Eagle-Vail; Luca Bruno in the Solaris; Lift Cafe inside The Westin; Colmar Lab near the Beaver Creek covered bridge; and behind the red Audi A7 on display.

Pushing Pinsanity

The Vail Valley Foundation is encouraging Pinsanity in a big way.

They’re giving away pins for each race, and one training day, after the races around Beaver Creek Plaza, around Championships Plaza and another bunch during Apres Avon.

If you don’t feel up to banging elbows with a teenager for free pins, you can plunk down about $15 and buy them — a small price to pay for your dignity.

Such a deal we got for you: You can buy all the Vail Daily pins for $150, instead of the $225 it would cost if you bought them separately.

A place for your pins

You need a place to put your pins.

That’s why the Vail Rec District, who loves you and wants what’s best for you, is giving away lanyards and VIP cards on which you can display your pins.

Get your lanyards free daily at Dobson Arena and the Vail Daily Building.

In Vail and Beaver Creek, Pinsanity was around for the chondola opening, Chair 4, Chair 5, Vail’s Gondola 1 and all sorts of other local stuff. We even had a pin commemorating that the World Championships were 100 days away.

Bob’s Bubba Glove, BrIcklin’s beanie

Bob and Erin Boselli were around for the other two World Championships and saw how huge pin trading has become. They’ve tried all sorts of other things, and most of them are wonderful.

Along with pins they have cowbells, beer steins and all kinds of other stuff.

They’re also offering a pin set, mounted in a shadow box you can display.

There was, however, last year’s Bubba Glove.

“They weren’t a winner,” Erin said.

Bricklin found a sweater beanie. Little arms stick out of the side of a knitted hat, and it’s pretty darned adorable.

The driver’s cap is back, similar to the insanely popular items in 1989 and 1999. There’s one with the 2015 logo in the front, the 1999 logo on the right and 1989 logo on the left. Some baseball caps have all three logos.

Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 and rwyrick@vaildaily.com.


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