Collector's Item

At week's end Swiss athletes had won only one gold medal, but they had something more valuable--at least in the minds of Olympic pin traders. For the fourth straight Games, the large team pin (inset) given to each Swiss athlete is the one most prized by collectors. "No doubt it is the pin all of us are after," said Ross Baxter, who has been trading pins since the 1988 Olympics in his native Calgary. "It's definitely worth much more than its weight in gold." Baxter says that the market started out hot for NBC pins, but the network, which is flooding U.S. households with 1,210 hours of coverage, also flooded the pin market. "They sure drove their value down," Baxter said. --Don Yaeger

COLOR PHOTO

GEOFFREY MICHAUD (PIN)