Name: Sarah Poirier

From: Canada

How long have you been collecting? 3 years

How many pins do you own? 250+

I fell in love with the Olympics in 1994, when the Winter Games were in Lillehammer and I was 10 years old. Thirteen years later, I found myself living and working in Oslo. I was searching for a link.

I bought a few old 1994 Olympic pins. I bought a few more. I went to a flea market one day and a man was selling pins off of an old felted hat. I bought three.

I spent the rest of the week tossing and turning and waking in cold sweats and wondering what I would do if I went back the next week and there were no more. I panicked, I worried, I craved more. The next week, I went back and the man remembered me and he asked if I was back for more pins. I bought the entire hat full of them. It was still the best material purchase that I made the entire time I was in Norway.

I cradled it as if it were a baby, and I was hooked on pins. I will always owe it to my time spent in Norway and the magic of Lillehammer - to see the city and to stand there knowing that it once held the eyes of the world, but that it managed to remain tiny, small, humble, rural... that was what captivated me. And to know that even if I wasn't there, that there were artefacts of it that I could hold onto, ones which could become a part of me, that was enough to feel like a part of history.

Pin collecting is our link into the past, in some way, the only legacy of the Games. Pins transcend borders, people come from all over and converge on a place and then return home. And my favourite pin story will always be the way that man at the flea market on a street corner in Oslo remembered me, and the way he smiled when I said that I would take them all.