1991 Impel US Olympic Cards

Here's another pack of Olympic cards to open while watching Beach Volleyball on the tube. As you can see I picked this one up at a slight discount. In the mid 90's every Eckerds in Georgia flushed their entire trading card inventory resulting in a lot of cheap pickups for me. Of course the packs were stuff like Olympic cards and Collector's Choice football, but who cares, it was cheap. This set has 90 cards, no inserts that I know of and features US Olympic Hall of Fame members. Here's the pack:


87 Title Card
12 Dick Button
58 1964 US Basketball team
85 Charles Paddock
83 Willie Davenport
68 1980 US Hockey Team
45 Tracy Caulkins
26 Wyomia Tyus
5 Bob Mathias
32 Dan Gable
75 Robert J. Kane
29 Sugar Ray Leonard
31 Ralph Boston
34 Debbie Meyer
25 Edwin Moses

The title card is kind of boring, but I guess you've gotta have it. There's a few big names in the pack. Dick Button for skating, Dan Gable for wrestling, Bob Mathias for the decathlon. It's a pretty neat Olympic history lesson. The photos are very good, most of them in the set are action shots of them competing in the games. Special Olympic Contributor Robert J. Kane speaking at a podium isn't too action packed, but every card can't be good. There's no baseball or football, but boxing, hockey and basketball are represented. The Sugar Ray card is, um, sweet. I'm really liking seeing all these boxing legends in the Olympic sets. The 1980 hockey team card is pretty cool as Jim Craig and Buzz Snyder gang up on a Soviet player. My favorite card of the pack is the '64 hoops squad as the back of the card has a full team roster with stats for the tournament. That's a pretty good team right there, I see several future NBA stars and one senator on there. If you want to see more of these check out my blog later tonight (or maybe tomorrow morning, I'm kinda tired) and I'll have several posted for you to check out.

1991 Impel U.S Olympic Cards Decathlon Gold

I've gone Olympics crazy over on my blog and I'm going to let the madness creep into A Pack A Day. If you're already sick of Olympiad hoopla, tough luck buster. I have three more Olympic themed packs for you this fortnight and a fourth if I can find it cheap enough. This here is not so much a pack as a set. Impel is known more for non-sports cards, but in 1991 they put out an Olympic issue. This was a preview of that set and featured all 5 living American Gold medal winners in the decathlon. I think there might have been an autographed version of the set too, but I pulled this out of a 25 cent box in anticipation of the Beijing games.

1 Bob Mathias

2 Milt Campbell

3 Rafer Johnson

4 Bill Toomey

5 Bruce Jenner

It's a pretty good looking set of some American Olympic legends. The Hall of Fame set they put out later in 1991 looks nothing like this one though, a shame, because this is a pretty simple clean design. I especially like the backs with the color photo, detailed bio and stats! Career stats on an Olympic card makes me smile. These guys did more than win one medal in one competition. They don't pull punches either as Bruce Jenner's 10th place finish in the 1972 Munich games is listed on his card. It's an interesting little set if you can find it.