Olympic Pin Trading Is a Sport of Its Own — and Everyone Wants Simone Biles's Custom Pin
"It’s like a rare Pokémon."
Published July 31 2024, 11:54 a.m. ET
Amid all the pressure and intensity that athletes face at the Olympics, there's one sport that everyone can get in on — and have fun with, too.
That would be the "sport" of pin trading, of course. It's a fun way for athletes in the Olympic Village to get to know each other, and it's also got a cool history.
It's a tradition that goes back to the first "modern" iteration of the Olympic games, all the way back in 1896 in Athens, when cardboard badges were used as a way of identifying athletes, judges, and officials. Over time, the media and spectators got in on the action too, and soon everyone was trading and collecting pin badges.
Naturally, one of the most coveted pins today would be the custom pin that gymnastics GOAT Simone Biles brought with her to the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. How do we get one?!
A spectator wearing pins on his baseball cap watches the final of the 70 Metres Ski Jumping event during the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, Canada.
Simone Biles's Olympic pin is custom and coveted.
Simone actually brought her own custom special edition pins to Paris, as she announced on Instagram ahead of the games. The gold-colored, heart-shaped pins feature her name inside, alongside a heart.
And, as expected, these have become a hot-ticket item in the pin-trading scene at the Olympic Village. On social media, some elated folks have posted videos about their own experiences getting their hands on one of Simone's special pins.
New Zealand rugby player Tysha Ikenasio excitedly showed off her Simone pin to the cameras in a TikTok video posted to her country's team account. "This pin is her personal pin," Tysha explained in the video, "and basically I had to walk up and beg that she took one of our New Zealand pins, and then she said that she'd give me her personal pin. So I feel like I clocked the pin game. I got it."
"I am living for pin trading at the Olympics TikTok!" wrote one fan in the comments section, while another wrote of Simone's pin: "It’s like a rare Pokémon." Someone else commented: "I want to go to the Olympics just to get her pin."
Speaking of which ... can you get Simone's pin? Is it for sale?
Are Simone Biles's custom Olympic pins for sale?
From the looks of it, if you want to get your hand on any kind of pins of your own, you can try eBay, like this one Redditor said about finding pins from past games. We imagine the pins from Paris will eventually make their way to the internet at some point, if they haven't already. Someone on Reddit also provided a link to this handy website, olympinclub.com, which also has some info on what pins are worth.
We'd assume that a custom Simone pin would be worth a pretty penny. As one commenter wrote under Tysha's aforementioned video about nabbing a Simone pin: "That's at least a $100K, Simone's the greatest gymnast alive."
