1996 Centennial Olympics Dufex inserts

The Atlanta Olympic Committee licensed a very artistic Olympic set to sell during the '96 games. I ripped a pack here if you want to check it out. These weren't very popular as it was not a traditional sports set filled with athletes and it had to go up against a star filled Upper Deck Olympic set. There's one cool thing about the set though and that is the dufex inserts that could be found.

There were dufex cards of the official Olympic posters of 20 summer and winter games inserted at one in nine packs. I didn't pull one of them, but you can see a sample of them in this eBay auction. They look really nice and I have to admit the action is tempting me badly.

There were also dufex cards of 12 of the torches used in the games. These were somewhat difficult to find at one in every 25 packs, but I managed to get lucky and find this in one of the packs I snapped up out of the clearance bin. Here's the dufex torch card I previewed over here. It's a really neat looking card, although they reversed the negative on this one. It's tough to see in the scan but the writing on the rim of the torch is reversed.


The best insert in my opinion was the once per pack logo "Fun Caps". The POG fad was more or less over by '96 but they put them in this set anyway. I good choice as far as I'm concerned, the metallic dufex gives them a great 3-D look that makes them look like little gold medals. I only have 5 of the 20 POGs, but I'd love to collect the set. Here are the five I have:

This one is from the 1936 Winter games in. Garmisch, Germany. The dufex didn't capture much detail from the logo, but it looks neat.


This one from the 1936 Games in Berlin is the best looking of the bunch. The colums and multiple athletes pop out nicely in the dufex technology. There's a neat zooming effect on the athlete when you move the POG.

This coat of arms logo from Melbourne 1956 is really busy but looks great. I like the kangaroo poking out of the middle ring on top.

I think this POG showing the 1964 Innsbruck emblem would have been more effective had they left off the writing around the edge.


This is a strange one, since they didn't use the official 1976 Montreal logo, but instead used the Olympic Stadium and Montreal Tower. This is odd as the Tower was not completed until 1987 and was not seen at the games at all.

One of these days I'm going to find a box of this stuff and get a whole mess of POGs. There were cards in this set too, I'll show off some of them tomorrow. A warning though - there are some strange cards in this set.

1996 Olympics Day 5

I'm dangerously close to getting two days behind here so I'm going to give you the abbreviated version of day 5. I don't care much for this issue anyway. The griping and bitching by the writers is in full force as after 3 days of events they give a report card on the games and there's bitching a-plenty about the crowds and transportation to the events. Yeah, sorry we didn't have that Teleporter ready for the games. Even more annoying is the snide comments on Ambiance - "No one ever accused Atlanta of being beautiful" and Hospitality - "Y'all sure are friendly!". Hey SI: FuuuuuuUUUUUUUUuuuucccccckkkkk YoooooOOOOOOUUUuuuuu. They did give us an A for security so that shows you how much they know. There's just a lot of general negativity in the issue. There's a hand wringing expose' on rampant scalping of tickets. There's four pages dedicated to whining about souvenir pins. Pins for gawd's sake. There's also a bizarre swipe at Charles Barkley. The AJC has a feature called The Vent where readers and leave snarky quotes and quips on current events. Barkley apparently got quoted and said "The rooms are tight... especially with all the stuff they give us along the way". They didn't print the full quote so there's no context, but to me it looks like Charles is using the word tight in a slang fashion meaning "cool" or "really nice". SI interpreted it as Charles complaining that the rooms were too small to get his fat butt into. Nice. So either SI was completely out of touch or they had a hatchet job agenda on the games.

There's a lot of swimming in the magazine, including a pic of Amanda Beard, the gold-winning women's relay team and a fluff piece on a couple of male swimmers horsing around the Olympic village. That's a fun one, we get to see Eric Wunderlich having his back shaved. Yahoo. They also sign a volunteer's stomach and play a game of tic-tac-toe while they're at it. There's no baseball or softball coverage at all despite the men beating Korea 7 to 2 and the women blanking blanking the Netherlands 9 to zip. USA leads the medal count with 15 and Russia has 7 golds.

1996 Olympics Day 4

I'm going to speed through this issue so I can try to get the Day 5 magazine posted tonight and get caught up. This issue is dominated by swimming as is evident by Tom Dolan's cover photo. The cover story features the rivalry between Dolan and Eric Namesnik and their battle in the 400 individual medley. There's a couple of mentions of the Chinese swim team and the new anti-steroid rules that the writers seemed convinced were going to get the entire China contingent banned. The rules are detailed in the Scorecard section and they are pretty ridiculous. If four swimmers from a nation fail a drug test, all the swimmers from that country get a ban for four years. Even better, it's not the country where they are from that was important, but the nation where they trained. Sounds perfectly fair to me, I can't see how that could ever get abused by a nation sending a few scrub swimmers to train in a rival country only to purposefully get caught to wipe out their rival's entire program. Do the anti-doping nazis even think about the bass-ackward rules they make? Sheesh. Finally there is a great article on Janet Evans, which is completely ruined by an ad for toenail fungus medicine right in the middle of it. With graphic photo!

The other focus in the magazine is on the gymnastic team, with a one page article on the female squads and a photo essay on gymnasts' hands and feet. That is where the fungus ad should have gone. The United States takes the lead in the medal count with 2 golds and 10 overall. Poland has the most gold medals at 4 with some victories in judo and wrestling. Two days in, the United Kingdom is the nation that is most surprisingly not on the medal board, although Ireland has a gold medal.

Ben was right about Kosuke Fukudome playing in the 1996 Olympics. The third baseman (?!) is featured stretching for a line drive in the recap of Japan's 8-7 loss to powerhouse Cuba. Japan nearly knocked off the Cuban team for the first time in international competition since 1983, but the Cubans scored two runs in the bottom of the tenth. Legendary Cuban pitcher Pedro Luis Lazo faced off against Hitoshi Ono in the game which featured a mammoth home from from Cuban cleanup hitter Orestes Kindelan. The 521 foot homer was the longest in the history of Atlanta-Fulton County stadium. Think about that a minute. The women's softball team doesn't get a fancy write up but their victory over Puerto Rico is acknowledged with this photo of Dot Richardson celebrating after a homer.

Card Of the Week 8/11/08

Muhammad Ali.

The Greatest.

EVER.



But his momma call him Clay, I'mma call him Clay.

Back when he won the gold medal in Rome, he was called Clay, so this card is correct in calling him Cassius Clay. Everybody knows who he is though, he's Muhammad Ali. If you're not familiar with his boxing, just go to YouTube and start watching. Make sure you watch the interviews as well, he is as good a showman as a boxer. Maybe better. This card is from an Olympic themed set Topps put out in '83 or '84 to cash in on the '84 Olympics in Los Angeles. There are a bunch of legends in that set, but this one is by far the best.

I've always liked Muhammad Ali. He was just so larger than life when I was growing up, even though I never saw him fight in his prime. Ali had a second Olympic highlight in the 1996 games in Atlanta. I lived through those games, and enjoyed them a lot even though I only got to one event and I was pretty inconvenienced by the road blocks for some of the venues. I had a ball just being there. Getting to soak in all the hoopla in the city. Getting to see the entire world show up to my hometown. Knowing that Atlanta is an Olympic city no matter what anyone else thinks of that.

The games had a lot of good moments, but they caught a lot of flack too. The easiest storyline for writers was the redneck angle, and there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over late buses and ticket lines. There was criticism (justified) over the hyper-marketing of the games. We suffered a tragedy when a psycho planted a pipe bomb in Centennial Olympic Park because he was against abortion and hated gays. At the end of the games, the same man who announced that Atlanta had won the games in 1990, slighted the city. So despite the first hand testimony of many who actually attended the games that they were wonderful, the 1996 Olympics will always have that stain on it thanks to those writers going with the easy story, the organizers going with the easy money, and the officials who decided it was safe to stick their nose up at the commercialization once the cash was deep within their pockets.

There's one thing that no one can take away from the '96 games though.

The lighting of the cauldron.

You can say what you want about the pickup trucks, Whatizzit, and broken down buses. You can even say that the cauldron itself is ugly as hell, I won't mind. Because the man we chose to light the cauldron was Muhammad Ali.



The. Greatest. Ever.

And that's one moment from the 1996 games that will live on as a triumph and no one can take that away.

Olympics Day 3

I took one day off to watch some actual Olympic events and now I'm already hopelessly behind. It's not too bad, because this issue is admittedly more boring than the others. It's the first one that had pics of an actual event on the cover, so they chose... Tony Kukoc?

Croatia didn't even win the game, they got upset by Lithuania. I guess SI was hell bent on selling magazines with a name basketball player on the cover of this issue. The inside isn't that great either. The Scorecard section opens up with several redneck jokes and ticket horrors, cementing the theme of the "Good Ol' Boy" Olympics that plagued us until the bombing occurred. Then it was the "Incompetent Good Ol' Boy"Olympics. They threw in a story abut this Iranian woman who was in the air rifle competition, the first Iranian woman to compete in the Olympics since the revolution in 1979. The tone of the story is a bit odd as they try to simultaneously praise her as a victory for Women's Rights by the fact that she is there at all, while also gawking at the fact that she wears her headscarf and full dress even under her shooting jacket. Of course FOX news would run this today with the caption "ZOMG! MUSLIMS! WITH GUNS! AT THE OLYMPICS!!! TERROR THREAT!" so whateva.

The articles are a mix of semi current events and more prefab fluff pieces.The cover story is about how every other basketball team is playing for the silver.There's is in an inordinate amount of weepy stories. One told of a sixteen year old swimmer from New Zealand who cried after she was eliminated on the first day. Another told of Canadian rower Silken Laumman, who fought back and won a medal in Barcelona after her right leg had been torn to shreds months earlier in a recing accident. The best was about Angel Martino, a swimmer from Georgia who won America's first medal at the games, and how she gave the medal to Trisha Henry. Trisha was a volunteer at the games, a fellow swimmer who knew Angel from a swim camp, and had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year. They mix in the ridiculous with the sublime though, with a photo essay on the 119 lbs and under weightlifting class. It would have been nice if there was an actual article to go along with the pictures, but instead they went for the "Hey, look at the little guys lifting weights!" angle instead.

This is the first issue with published results and medal counts. For the record, Germany led with five medals (2 silver, 3 bronze) and China was in second with 2 golds. On the results page we also find out that Halil Mutlu of Turkey was the champ of the 119 and under weightlifting final with 633.81 lbs. As far as USA goes, there's a recap of Argentina blowing out USA men's soccer, and the USA-Nicaragua baseball game at Atlanta-Fulton County stadium. Kris Benson pitched and won the game 4-1. Matt LeCroy and Chad Allen (above) are also mentioned in the article. See, there's a little baseball in these Olympic posts!

Olympics Day 2

Here's the second Olympic Daily from 1996. I really noticed the date for the first time. Saturday, July 29, 1996. What idiot decided July in Georgia was a good time to do anything outside, let alone the Olympics? For some reason I thought we held the games in September. Oh well, it could have been worse, it could have been August. August in Atlanta suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Blazing hot, then massive thunderstorms with tornadoes and hail and frogs dropping from the sky, then blazing hot again the next day and 150% humidity thanks to the storm. My absolute favorite season is fall, obviously.

This magazine has a ton of filler in it due to the Opening Ceremonies being the only event the day before. There are only two pictures of the ceremony though, the cover photo and this fantastic two page spread in the magazine:

That is significantly cropped from the full picture. I couldn't fit the whole thing on the scanner. One thing I regret is not going to a single event at the Olympic Stadium. Although I've been to The Ted plenty of times, I would have liked to have seen it once before a big slice was taken out of the stadium to convert it to the Braves' park. This photo is neat in that it is from the perspective of being almost right behind home plate in Turner field. You can see the upper deck curving out on either side and poor old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium way in the background. I'm glad this picture is of generic flags and dancers and such, and not the infamous "Pickup Trucks With Cheerleaders" bit that caused such a stir.

Speaking of southerners being uncouth at the games, there's a fantastic article in there written by Gerry Callahan about the pickpockets, street hustlers and proselytizers that descended on downtown Atlanta for the games. The alternate title of the article is perfect: "I Went To The Olympics And A Flea Market Broke Out". That was a pretty good description of the Games in many ways. This was without a doubt the biggest thing Ever to happen to the South since Sherman came to town, and everyone looking for a piece of the action descended like locusts. The biggest hustlers through were the organizers, who marketed, merchandised and sold the Olympics to death.

Since there was a lot of space to kill in this issue most everything in it was a fluff piece promoting what was to come or giving a behind the scenes look at the games. There is a huge article chronicling the last second finishing touches put in place days before the Games began. The new sports introduced this year were featured, including Women's Soccer which became of of my enduring memories of the Games, and the very TV friendly Beach Volleyball. Like all issues of SI a few pages were reserved for a Scorecard section that had smaller articles and factoids about the events. Some tidbits were insightful such as boxer Lawrence Clay-Bey getting a brutal first round draw to match up against 1995 World Champion Alexei Lezin (Which was changed for some reason to an even more difficult match with Wladimir Klitschko), to goofy stuff like the guy who made his house into the New Mexico Consulate when a resident of Santa Fe was denied ordering tickets by phone since he was from a foreign country. The thing that really caught my eye was this quote from the athlete who ended up having the biggest moment of all in the Olympics:

The feature article in the issue was a piece on the Men's Basketball Dream Team. It had a big picture of Hakeem Olajuwon in front of a flag backdrop that I'm pretty sure was used in at least two trading card sets. The main thrust of the piece was how this Dream Team was a classy group of professionals, unlike those thug hoodlums from the 1994 Dream Team. They then illustrate this fact with the absolute best photo of the issue, Charles Barkley stalking some unsuspecting reporter possibly for this.

Damn, I love Charles...

Olympics Day 1

The Olympics were in Atlanta 12 years ago. Damn, was it that long ago? Anyway, they were here, they were fun, our official mascot was the biggest disaster since the Edsel, everyone fled the city so there was no traffic, a stupid redneck idiot embarrassed the city, the games went on and snobby European assclowns crapped all over the city on the way out. We got some nice stadiums, a cool park, about 8 zillion in advertising dollars and a lot of good memories out of the deal so screw the eurotrash snobs. I was in college at the time, broke, working and going to school full time and had no tickets to anything. I still managed to have a good time, but I really wanted something I could keep from the Olympics to remeber it all. I decided to collect these:



Sports Illustrated published a magazine a day for the Atlanta Olympics and they were sold pretty much everywhere in the state. They were three bucks a pop so it wasn't too expensive, but damn it added up if you were broke. I got most of mine at the Quik Trip on the way to work. I'd pick up a soda and a snack and start on the hour and a half drive to my job. I went to school in Athens and I worked in Conyers, so it was normally about 40 minute commute. Unfortunately for me, the Equestrian events were held off of Highway 138, the route I took to work everyday. this was completely blocked off for non-elite working clas folks, so instead I had to drive up highway 316 to I-85, then to I-285 south, then to I-20 south to Conyers. Find a map and look it up, if you dare... Needless to say it was a hell of a long drive.

Since it's Olympics time again, I'm going to breakout my stash of ols magazines and show them off to the world. All the other issues recapped the previous day's events (SI did a great job on turnaround for these mags) but since this was the issue that cam out the day of the Opening Ceremonies, there really wasn't anything to recap. Instead there's a lot of fluff in this issue. A preview of some of the events, a very long article on the torch relay and an article on basketball payer Sheryl Swoopes. Here's some good images from this fluff issue.

This is an odd picture to be sure... This is Michelle Sawatzky, a Canadian volleyball player who happens to be a pianist. I guess she aspired to be a lounge singer too? The Canadian volleyball team came in tenth, but Michelle went on to be a singer and motivational speaker.

Here's a pic from the torch relay. I don't think anything more needs to be said.

This could very well be the best photo in all the magazines. Sheryl Swoopes playing hoops with Supreme Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Yes, Sports Illustrated got in the required "Supreme Court" pun.