00:00A small memento from Milan 2026 and Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
00:08These are tiny treasures from Olympic history.
00:12Pin traders are gathering here in Italy as the 2026 Winter Olympics draw to a close,
00:18turning the Games into a global marketplace.
00:25Pin trading can be traced back to 1924, when athletes in Paris exchanged them as a gesture of friendship.
00:33Today, the tradition has expanded to passionate pin collectors around the world.
00:382019 is where it really kicked off.
00:40Just prior to Tokyo, actually, is where I really started collecting and building up a collection.
00:46And then COVID hit and it became really difficult.
00:49But we continued that trading and collecting and kind of obtaining stuff for our collections throughout COVID.
00:55We were trading on Facebook, we were trading via email, sending pins all over the world.
01:01Many collectors spend years waiting for the next Games
01:04and often travel long distances just to trade, buy and hunt down rare additions.
01:10So the smaller the country is, the less participants or athletes there are,
01:14the higher the value of those pins are because it's so difficult to find.
01:17So just to give an example, there's a pin of Madagascar, I don't have yet.
01:23Yeah, there's a pin of Saudi Arabia, I don't have yet.
01:26There's a skier from United Arab Emirates, one athlete, I don't have that pin yet.
01:31So these are really the pins you want to look for because you want to have one pin of each
01:35nation participating.
01:39With pin trading such a big part of the Olympic experience,
01:43special events here in Italy are helping collectors celebrate the tradition
01:47and carry it forward for the next generation of Games.
01:51Leon Lian, Sandy Chi and Laurel Stewart for Taiwan Plus.
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