- Jane Grissom, a dedicated Olympic pin trader, plans to bring 1,000 pins to the 2026 Winter Olympics.
- Grissom has attended 10 Olympics and owns over 10,000 pins, thanks to the connections she's made at previous Games.
- Milan's Winter Olympics will feature a pin trading center, unlike the Paris Games in 2024.
SALT LAKE CITY — At first glance, it looks like a colorful collection. But even Janet Grissom will admit, it's more of an addiction.
"Yeah, no question," she said with a laugh.
Binders filled with shiny pins line the room at Janet Grissom's Salt Lake City home.
"So, that's a really killer pin right there," Grissom said, flipping through a page.
Each pin tells a story of a place, a mascot or an Olympic Games she's traveled halfway around the world to attend.
Grissom is one of the most dedicated Olympic pin traders in the country, possibly even the world. She has attended 10 Olympic Games and owns at least 10,000 pins, though she says that number is probably low.
"I've said 10,000," she said. "It's probably higher than that, but I kind of stopped counting at 10."
While some people collect pins, Grissom trades them.
It's those moments with other people that keep her coming back to the Olympics again and again.
"I think it's this way with many hobbies. You meet people. It's a real social thing," she said. "The pins are pretty. You get to go to another country and trade with people that, you know, maybe don't even speak the language that you speak."
She said pin trading isn't just about the pins themselves, but the connections they create.
"And it's just really, really fun," she said.
Grissom is now preparing for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan, where she said organizers have promised to bring back a dedicated pin trading center, something that was missing from the Paris Games.
"They announced that they had made a mistake in Paris, that they kind of missed the boat, and they were going to make sure that there was a pin trading center in Milan," said Grissom. "There was no place to get pins, so that's one of the reasons why the pin trading didn't happen."
She's already been sorting through her collection and narrowing down what to take.
"I used to take 2,000 pins, and now I've kind of scaled back. … I'm taking a thousand pins," she said.
On a good day, she said she might trade anywhere from 50 to 100 pins.
Many of the pins Grissom plans to bring come from the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics, which she said remain popular with traders around the world more than 20 years later.
"I've got a lot of Salt Lake pins that I'm going to take with me to trade because, I mean, they're beautiful pins, and they'll trade great," she said.
Some of the popular Salt Lake City Olympic pins include the famous Jell-O, funeral potatoes, and fry sauce pins, which became valuable during the 2002 Games.
"During the Olympics, it was selling for $300," Grissom said.
I kind of stopped counting at 10.
–Janet Grissom
It was during the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics when Grissom got into pin trading, though at first she didn't want to.
"I had avoided doing pin collecting because I thought I might get in and be too addicted to it," she said with another laugh.
Grissom was a volunteer during the 2002 Games in the doping control area for athletes. Many athletes and coaches wanted to trade pins with her, but she didn't have any.
So, she bought a few to start trading. One became two. Two became many more.
And before she knew it, she was hooked.
For her, the true value of the pins isn't the amount of dollars they're worth; it's about the connections they bring, one small pin at a time.
"That is my favorite part. Getting to meet people and talk to them," she said. "It's just really, really fun."
