About ... Bid Pins

Pins have been a part of the Olympic Games since the turn of the 20th century. Nowadays, everybody has a pin - the athlete, the official, the sponsor, the media representative, the law-enforcement officer - and the list goes on. Here's an overview of Bid pins.

A city or organization doesn't have to wait for the Games to come before producing pins. A committee bidding for future Games will pump up its campaign by distributing pins and other promotional materials emblazoned with the city name, the bid logo and the target year.

Bid cities are recognized first by national Olympic committees as their official bid finalists and then national bid city, followed by recognition by the IOC as a candidate city, finalist and eventual bid winner. That could result in different pins marking the different stops along the process: bid-city pins, candidate-city pins and finalist pins. And once a city wins the right to host the Olympics, another logo change islikely in the works.

For example, after Sydney won the 2000 Summer Games, it dropped its outline of the Opera House skyline design for its "millennial man" logo depicting a torch-runner made up of boomerang shapes. And Salt Lake eventually dropped its vertical, three-sided bid logo for the snowflake-like emblem representing the sun over a snowy mountaintop.