Olympics are Kling’s Hobby

When he’s not coaching the Palisades High tennis teams, Bud Kling is busy with his hobby: Olympic pin collecting and trading. He recently returned from a 23-day trip to Torino, Italy, where he helped organize the Coca-Cola pin trading center and the main trading center in the Olympic Village. “My wife and I and another couple stayed at a rustic style house in Peccato, a village 15 minutes outside of Torino,” Kling says. “Our neighbors had chickens and cows. I brought 1,000 pins with me and we gave all of them away. We gave some to kids and we donated some to the Boys Scouts and Special Olympics.” Kling has well over 10,000 pins in his personal collection. At every Olympics, millions of pins are exchanged. There are also many different types of pins, made for various entities: sponsors, networks, print and broadcast media, transportation, souvenir and internal staff. Some of Kling’s favorites are the National Olympic Committee (NOC) pins and bid pins–made for and by cities bidding for future Games. One of Kling’s biggest thrills was carrying the Olympic torch for the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002. Kling ran an eighth-of-a-mile stretch in Hancock Park. “The soccer star Cobi Jones lit my torch and Martin Sheen was three people in front of him,” Kling remembers. Kling organizes pin trading seminars and even designs his own pins. In fact, the 2006 Palisadian-Post pin that he designed with Tom Brooke was voted one of the 10 best of the Torino Games by the Today Show. “If I had to pick a favorite, I’d pick Barcelona [in 1992],” Kling says. “The weather was fantastic. But Nagano in 1998 was definitely the best in terms of pin trading. They were buying, selling and trading them like crazy over there.” Kling’s love of the Olympics started when he was a boy and the interest in pin trading started when he saw a news clip of people trading pins at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The first Olympics he attended were four years later at the Summer Games in Los Angeles and he has attended every Olympiad since Barcelona. At the L.A. Games Kling was an interview coordinator for the American, Italian and Yugoslavian men’s basketball teams. He served on the administrative staff for the Malawai Olympic team in Athens, Greece, in 2004, managed pin trading at the British Commonwealth Games in 1994 and has been offered the same position for the Asian Games at Doha, Qatar, in December. “It’s become a family thing now,” Kling says. “My son Ryan (a sophomore at the University of Oregon) managed one of my sites in Athens and my daughter Alex (a junior at Pali) will probably go to the Vancouver Games in 2010. We want this hobby to keep going so I’m passing the torch, so to speak.”