1996 Collect-A-Card Centennial Olympic Games Collection

Today's Olympic pack is from the 1996 Olympics. This was an official product of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and has the Atlanta games logo on the back. The manufacturer is Collect-A-Card, but I'm not sure if that was an oddball non sport manufacturer that popped up in the '90s or if ACOG just made it up to produce this set. The overall theme of this set is "Artsy Fartsy". There are very few athletes profiled and most of the set is made up of official posters of various games and artistic photos that represent the spirit of the games. Like the last pack, this one ended up in deep clearance at Eckerds.


12 of 20 Innsbrook 1964 Gold Medal pogs
112 Babe Didrickson
7 Champions - 200 Meters - Women
14 Champions - 800 Meters - Men
27 Champions - Marathon - Women
47 Champions - High Jump - Men
74 Champions - Pentathlon
87 Champions - 200 Meter Freestyle - Women
54 Champions - Long Jump - Women


As you can see there is one card of an Athlete and the rest have a list of gold medal winners for a particular sport on the pack, with an unrelated Olympic themed photo or poster on the front. The American flag card above had the Women's 200 meter dash winners on back, including Wilma Rudolph and FloJo. It's an interesting set, but a normal collector of baseball cards would be put off by the lack of actual athletes and most non sports collectors probably aren't interested enough in the Olympics to try to build a set. So now we have a set without a wide audience, which ironically is probably what ACOG was shooting for when they designed it. One big plus for the set is that it has a few dufex insert cards to chase. One of them is a one per pack Gold Medal:

The package calls them "Fun Caps" but we all know them as POGs. It's a really cool little insert, the dufex gives them a 3-D metallic look like a real medal. Of course since POGs are designed for playing a game where a heavy metal object is thrown at them repeatedly, one would think that after a few games the delicate dufex would be a wreck. I'm going to save the POGs and flip the cards instead.