B an Olympic Games There is traditionally an unofficial competition for pin collectors. There are people walking around the arenas with hundreds of pins on their jackets. These people – mostly men – look like they’ve dressed up in little fridge magnets.
They wear the official Olympic Games pins issued by Olympic committees, sports associations, host cities, ski clubs or other organizations that have something to do with sports or the Olympics – or not. Randall Hamer also walks around like that. On the subway on the way to the opening ceremony he exchanges pins with a journalist from Kazakhstan.
“Thank you!” he says as he puts on the pin from Alamty. “But I have more than one pin. I have a pin that tells the biggest story you can imagine,” says the man, who is probably around 60 years old. I hear that and stupidly I look so interested that the good man starts preaching in my direction too.
Now I too have to listen to the story that is said to be the greatest of all time. The Olympics are about gold. And this time we are in Italy. The colors of Italy are green, white and red. Red, it is clear, stands for the blood that Jesus shed to free us from our sins. So that’s why the wind blows.
Good Randall can’t tell what I’m thinking and keeps talking. White stands for purity and green for growth, for becoming more and more like Jesus. Or so. Gold stands for eternal life and that’s what the Olympics are all about, immortality. The Kazakh colleague had already left well before the end of the story. Now I was Randall’s sole victim.
Like me, he had some kind of accreditation hanging around his neck. It was not issued by the International Olympic Committee, but by the “Olympic Ministry”. What that is, I ask. I can read about it online, he says, handing me a business card. What does he do at the games? “I help people,” he says. Where? “To understand the Bible”. Oh dear!
I get off at the next station. Randall puts the pin in my hand before the doors close. So now I have a pin like that too. “Jesus” is written big on it and „International Sports Chaplains“whatever that may be. I don’t think I’ll become a collector.