Major sporting events such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup are big business. Here in the early 21st century cities and countries spend millions of dollars just for the right to host these events. In so doing they create a lot of merchandising; pins and badges, t-shirts, mugs, documents etc. Basically lots and lots of stuff.
This is where I come in. I collect this stuff, although it is a fairly niche market compared with the thousands and thousands of item’s that turn up for the regular Olympic pin collectors, there is still plenty of stuff that can be collected.
The Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984 proved that the Olympics could make money. In the years up to that few cities, if any, really thought that staging the Olympic Games held the same prestige as we do today. In fact when the 1984 games were awarded, LA was the only really serious bidder. However in the aftermath of this, when the 1992 games came to be awarded a whole gaggle of world-class cities had put their name forward. This bidding process has grown so competitive now that the bid for the 2012 games looks to be amongst the most competitive ever with 7 or 8 top-notch bids being put forward. The race to be the US candidate city had close to a dozen applicants.
The intention here is to chronicle the history of these failed bids and games that never happened (1916, 1940, 1944 and Denver ‘1976) as well as cataloguing my collection of memorabilia. Simply click on one of the available links to the left to read about each Olympiad and to see the associated items for that year’s bidding process.
02/JUNE/03