PIN PALS

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Not many people can wear their retirement fund on their shirt.

Marlee Baker hasn't missed an Olympics—winter or summer—since 1984. Every two years, she meticulously plans a two-week vacation around The Games, then packs up her pins and heads to the host city. But she never pre-buys tickets. Her pins take care of that.

Baker, like hundreds of folks here in Beijing, is a pin trader. Much has been made of the obsession with Olympic pin trading, but the stories usually focus on the value of specific pins, whether the pin-trading business is on the decline or which sponsor pin has become this year's Holy Grail.

"Remember the green Jell-O pin from Salt Lake?" Baker asks Louie and Anthony, two traders seated on either side of her. They share a chuckle remembering the ugly green pin that climbed its way to a $200-$300 price tag on eBay. "It was a Mormon pin and had nothing to do with the Olympics," Baker says. "But that pin made it into the newspapers, and suddenly its price skyrocketed."

But that's not why Baker says she and her friends, fellow pin traders she's gotten to know over the years but only sees at the Olympics, collect and trade pins. It's not about money, or even about landing the pinnacle of plastic adornment (here, Mao pins are a hot commodity).

"Our goal is to collect one of every pin—I get two so I can give one to my daughter. But we do it because we love the Olympics. We love meeting people and being a part of the Games."

The value of Olympic pins is more than monetary. In the silk and pearl markets, a pocketful of pins is almost as valuable as an ATM withdrawl. And they are fantastic help in the bargaining process. Timm Jamieson of Roanoke, Virginia, says he's traded pins for everything from cold water and food to seats on an over-crowded bus, trinkets at the local market and tickets to Olympic events. (And, of course, to "trade up" for better pins.) In Beijing, event tickets are a valuable commodity. But so are rare pins. Jamieson scored tickets to volleyball, tennis and swimming by trading pins, and Baker landed entry to track-and-field and gymnastics.

"These Games are a lot like Nagano," Jamieson says. "They have such a giving culture here that I gave one little girl a pin, and the next day, her parents came back and brought me cans of coffee. They felt they needed to reciprocate the gift."

Wonder what he would have gotten for two.

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