Discussion: Archiving medals

Now that we know what people do with their old maps, what to we do with the mountain of medals that pile up over time?

My thought is that they could be recycled. USOF has a line item in the budget of 2K or so for medals; recycling could save that. I also think it would be fun to go to a meet where a hodgepodge of awards were being given out. Imagine if we were incented to win races to get first pick at the medal table.

Of course, the best medals are edible. I don't know who the chef was, but the cake that was awarded for first place at the Bubba Goat a few years ago was quite good. Unfortunately, that one displays a bit awkwardly on my mantle these days.

What do people like in a medal? Usefulness, uniqueness to the event, trophy appeal? Anyone have any interesting stories about particularily exotic, useful, or unusual awards?

Yeah, I got a cake once at the Billygoat and that was awesome. Pies have been given out before. Saw a funny commercial Sunday on OPN while watching the WC GS at Beaver Creek. Bodie Miller was sitting at his breakfast table and noticed it wasn't level, so he grabbed a medal and stuck it under one leg of the table.

Then when he was trying to back out of the driveway his wheel was slipping in the snow, so he reached into the glove box - which was stuffed with a tangle of medals - grabbed a big handfull of them and threw them under the wheel for traction.

Wadd has a huge ball of medals hanging in his home office. I think they are used as a counterbalance to keep the wall from collapsing under the weight of Hamilton's winter snows.

The rocks that Mikell gives out are cool. Plus when I get home and people ask how it went I can say: "I got a rock..."

Seems some people are really overwhelmed by this big amount of time suddenly at hand during the winter months. I personally poiish each medal and protect them with a resin two component block for conservation, keep them at exactly 40 degree Fahrenheit and low humidity in an old Adidas box (better than Nike!).

The gold medals I usually melt and resell, silver doesn't pay that much. Of course I have to feed the eastern big tooth beavers and they really appreciate some of the bulkier weird items.

There is also the auto polish system of the Brautigams: Hang the medals over the car seat. While you drive with pride in the back you have the karmic winning force driving your energy level up. Just don't know, why Joe has growing medals out of his ears now.

I do keep the maps and I write up some of the race story. Except that I am a few years behind with some maps, which I didn't do right away. I keep the maps and the course notes together by the year. It is great to look at old squiggles and think what the hell was I thinking then. Maybe I actually got better in map reading, as the squiggles get smaller and cover less square mileage.

I recently found my first orienteering map from 1970, definitely low tech, the text precomputer hand drawn. I thought I would remember the map exactly. When I recently went running in the same woods, I almost got lost, even though I have trained there everyday for several years.

As always, the words from piutepro are steeped with the wisdom of years of experience without any of the trauma and confusion that necessarily remains in the aftermath of even a modest attack badger attack (if "modest" can be appellated to such a horrific event). Enjoy them while you can, because you can never be sure he won't make the potentially fatal mistake of entering the Wyoming territories one day--perhaps to see for himself the splendors of a 1000 Day, or perhaps just to see the winds rushing by. At any rate, when that day does come it is all too likely the attack badger will forego the antelope just for one time in favor of some piutepro.

Let me just say that when I was in Laramie the badgers didn't bother me at all. I sort of wish they had made an appearance, especially that afternoon at Twin Boulders when I was armed with a 7-iron. Could have laid to rest once and for all this myth of ferocious attack badgers.

On the ferocity of attack badgers. At the Sierra O-fest in 2000, a bunch of came back to camp to find a huge black bear feasting on our food. We tried to scare it away, but it went up a tree. Eventually he came down, and we scared it off. Who was there the whole time sound asleep in his flimsy tent while this was going on? The Swampfox! I can imagine he saw the bear earlier and thought to himself, "Oh, a huge vicious bear, glad it isn't an attack badger. Yaaaawwwwn...time to go to bed."

The bear was framed. Swampfox ate the food.

7-iron is not a good choice of weapon against attack badgers, 45 mm cannon may stop them for a while, but I prefer to train and have a pair of legs that will let me escape and still have my toes attached (just like Swampfox does:).
As far as medals go: I collect them for 28 years, and display them proudly in my office at home, and not planning on recycling them for now.

I keep them in a Jalas shoe box under my bed :) except for 1 or 2 which I feel were somewhat well deserved so I sometimes hang them in odd places, like on my fish bowl with my fake glass fish hangs my silver canadian short medal.
Alot of the medals are kinda boring ones, that weren't very specific to orienteering... just what the medal places offer (running people). I prefer food!!! once I got fudge, once i got a small bag of oreos! I have been known to make the food prizes, like this year at te gvoc champs were (inspired by having been awarded fudge 2 years before) I made two colours of fudge and made them into little O signs (cut diagonally).
Also, pictures are nice, we received nice pictures of salal at the BC championships this year, that said our placing, the year, etc... You can keep them in a file with the map if you do not want to display them.
Gear is nice too, like the BC champs last year where we had axis gear stuff! much more useful!

Will it surprise you that I throw the medals out, usually before leaving the event? :)

Thought not.

And don't even get me started on T-shirts. I've just donated most of my old ones to charity (whether charity will want them is another question).

The most useful award I've ever gotten was for the 1990 Long-O Champs, where they gave out prizes through 6th place in M21 (and I was somewhere in the 4th-6th range). Got a tiny nylon waist pack that I figured to be completely useless at the time. But it turned out to be perfect for carrying a passport, credit card, and a little bit of money on a trip to Europe the following year. These days it holds the battery packs for my killer hatlamp.

The rest of my meager collection of awards is in a small box on the top shelf of the bookcase in my living room. I'm in favor of edible stuff. Especially if the people who win it share it with me.

Not necessarily useful, but one of the nicest awards I've seen was the stained glass "map" that Eddie made for the SVO "Short and Classic" a few years ago (Hammonds Rock & Kings Gap). If you didn't see it, I can't do it justice, but basically, it was two overlapping pieces of the map, made out of stained glass with the colors reflecting the various pieces of the map. Needless to say, I only got to see them at the ceremony.

More simply, Eddie has also made stained glass O flags that have been given out at the various SVO rogaines. These are nice as they hang as "sun catcher" ornaments in a window and send rainbows throughout the room.

(My personal award collection is so small that I don't care for edibles. I lose too large a percentage of the collection when I get hungry!)

I'm afraid I'm with Will on this one. Too many undeserved ones (ie first out of one in D14A). But I do like and save all mugs (they don't need polishing and I like coffee). On our desk holding pens is a very nice 'beanpot style' one that says Pine Hill CSU, October 2, 1984. And another from a JK relay (second place with Pam and Anne Dentino ... Pam joined NEOC briefly for the occasion). I have also saved, and still use, a rather ugly forest green bag with orange logo from HVO in the early 80s. And our mouse mat is from the NA champs in 2000. So I vote useful awards only! And food, of course.
Oh, and I do still have a West Point Shot Glass (with derogatory comments about the drinking capabilities of air force and navy grads) won for having the best team on yellow in the very early 80s ... It is Bridget's favorite glass.

How many medals does the $2K buy? (Championships or all A meets?) Could we replace medals for M/F-18 and up with gift certificates from a sponsor (for example, EMS/REI/... might be interested; we pay them $2K and they give us $4K worth of gift certificates, with the added benefit to them being the advertising at every A meet award ceremony?)

Alternatively, if $4K divided by the number of award winners comes out as a ridiculously small number, then how about some kind of lottery system (first in an A class gets 5 tickets, second gets three, third gets two, all finishers (not DNF/DSQ/MP) get one, and we raffle off (say) three $100 gift certificates to our sponsor each A meet)?

The problem with the 'curio' type awards is that all award planners think their award is cute, but only a quarter of the awardees actually agree. It's the same problem with T-shirts. People's tastes aren't the same. But everyone likes cash, and gift certificates might be a nice compromise.

I think it is important to have medals or some kind of awards for junior classes, incidentally. Even I liked my first few awards... And if there was one US championship, not 7, each year, then I might keep those too.

Finally, to avoid giving the impression I'm completely hard-hearted: I was in the process of trashing awards along with T-shirts on the weekend, and I did grant a reprieve to the 2004 OME A meet pottery mugs. One of the two is now holding my pens on my desk. The other is sitting in limbo between the desk and the trash can...

You can see those awesome stained glass map awards and the stained glass controls.

I guess I haven't outgrown the love of awards yet... medals are pinned to the top of my bulletin board, trophies/plaques/other are on the bookshelf and a wall shelf. I do like it when the awards are unique or useful objects. My non-work wardrobe also consists largely of meet shirts... very fashion forward.

The completely random awards Mikell used to give out after the Chase in Wyoming were the best. One year the top 25 or so finishers all received randomly chosen CDs. (I got "The Police--Live!" Yeah!)

The best year was when the awards were truly random, and almost everybody got one. I got a pair of socks (which I still have, amazingly enough). Evan Custer got a can of creamed corn, I believe. I remember people showing off their cans of Spam with great pride. And there were even one or two GOOD prizes in the mix, just to shake things up a bit.

When I was orienteering in Spain, all the prizes there were local food. After one event, my family ended up with four kilos of cheese! We also recieved blood sausages and tuna-like fish in olive oil. And socks. I really like the food idea as all my medals are hanging in my closet in a giant knot, so I never look at them.
My favourite medals ever were from APOC 2002. They were really pretty maple leaves that apparently came off of wind chimes (maybe??).

As a Kid, I was awsome and had awards out the kazoo (Mostly running and not orienteering). I started given them out to my neighborhood friends at our made up games. Then I got older, slower and stupider, and started orienteering. The awards dried up and were much more infrequent. Now I cherish every award I get (ok almost all of them). There have been some really "junky" awards in which I would have preferred a medal to what was given. One award ceremony I was glad when I finished 4th when I saw what they giving for awards. Anyway the awards are scattered around my library which is also used as the overflow guest room so all can admire my great deeds :)

Medal awards can leave or not. But some clubs have come up with pretty nice awards. UNO gave out very nice duffel bags a few years ago. HVO gave out small hard-plastic water proof cases last year that were about the right size for a cigarette pack. Pretty ironic I thought at the time. Then I got a digital camera which fit in perfectly with a bit of padding for additional protection. That one has been much appreciated during long runs, skis or whatever.

I'm trying to remember whether the orange seat cushion with the word Orienteering repeated a dozen times was something I won or not. (It's something warm and dry to sit on when the other options are cold, wet benches or ground.)

The frisbee award was nice too. (It was shaped like the letter O, for some reason.)

The only bear I heard of at the World Masters spent the event up a tree. Small one. (AFAIK it's OK.) Swampfox wasn't there, so he can't have stolen its food.

Speaking of recycling awards, in 1993 I held a greatly simplified Troll Cup. By that time NEOC had a reasonable collection of unclaimed Troll Cups for obscure categories. For the cost of imagesetting new category labels and blueing them on, I was able to give out a full set of awards without buying any. (I think I did something similar for the New England Championships the following day.) People seemed pretty happy with recycled awards. (Of course, the Blue Hills Traverse just prints 400 shirts every fifth event, and lets finishers pick any year shirt they want of what's left over from the last few decades. Works well too. I have so many of the gray ones that I wonder if people think I just never change my T-shirt.)

Not any more ... the Traverse has new shirts every year now. At least, I think so - I didn't bother collecting one.

Those OME 2004 mugs are pretty much all I have left. Medals don't usually last more than a few days around here. The OME mugs are bigger than I like for coffee, but if I fill them only half way they're ok. I had some canvas bags from a BOK meet from about 15+ years ago, and I think they are still around somewhere. I've used other o-mugs, but they seem to all have broken or disappeared by now.

I rather liked the crystals that Swampie used to hand out at the relays. Some other favorite prizes are a fleece vest, stone coaster (use this all the time), and a ceramic scupture.

Going back to the Sierra O' Fest 2000 incident, I would like to point out that 1) the Swampfox didn't have guard duty that night, and 2) when the supposed bear feast took place, the Swampfox was sound asleep, and 3) that, yes, while there was a bear lurking around the campground area, both pre and post feast it was one very emaciated looking bear, and that, finally, 4) in contrast to the bear, there was one member (I will not name names) of the PNW based O' troup that was looking enormously engorged following the supposed bear feast. The question might be fairly asked: why was all the attention focused on the poor bear, and none on the replete human being? To one innocent bystander, it had all the markings of yet another O' skandal!

You guys are way tooo elite. Poor me, I am used to get some kind of award only every second year. There is no problems with archiving those. I keep them in a Volvo backback, I got it few years ago from Göteborg O-ringen.

Oh, those were the days. I even won one day (H21-3) and got a towel. That towel was stolen in 2005 Smålandskavlen rhis year while I was having shower ...

Speaking of O-Ringen the most pointless participation award i got at O-Ringen this year, those small rectangular plaque like pieces of metal with the o-ringen symbol on one side and that year's logo on the other (that they give out every year?). Does anyone know what you're supposed to do with them? It looks kinda cool but im still at a loss with what to do with it. Is there an obvious answer and i'm just stupid, or is it one of those things you keep in your box of medals?
Photo here

They give those oringen things out every year, I suppose people collect them!!! At the oringen I went to I was too stupefied/pissed off at myself (having botched the first control badly), that I failed to pick one up.... oh well. The oringen bag everyone got proved to be useful, but is now falling apart. I still have the sveaskog water bottle too...

The fact is some of us not longer appreciate our medals/awards since it sometimes seems too easy to get them in NA... the ones I treasure more are the ones were there were at least 10 people in my age class!!!!!

I too could live without the medals & trinkets though its not often I manage to finish in the top 3.

My favorite O swag is the duffel bag from the 2001 US Champs in New York - though they were available as purchased mementos, not given as prizes - but they were a nice change from t-shirts.

the big problem with t-shirts is that you rarely know what they will look like in advance - they might be nice (ie you might wear them occassionally) or they might suck and go directly to salvation army. Except for Billygoat shirts - most don't suck and I keep them anyway.

Billygoat shirts you do not buy, you deserve them!
I keep them and J-J keeps count of them.

No one has mentioned USOF medals. What do you do with them?! I have a few over the years. Somewhere along the line, I decided that the stickers did not suit their 'dignity' -:)
I found a place here in Concord, NH and have since had all engraved with the usuals like forest/place, category, date/dist and names of first three, maybe times too. Maybe $5 per medal. When I am dusting, it jogs the memory.

White people and their awards and egos......What medal will George B wear around his neck when he finally gets to hell?

I have a USOF Club Team Trophy from 1994 that I will donate to the first person who can tell me what it is and the A meet it was awarded.

Will!, No wonder why I have so many BHT shirts. I will send you 5 to make up for you missing out on race day!
Next year we go back to the old system (have a lot of BG 2005 shirts also).

Thanks, coach, I'm fine the way I am!

The metal medals are hanging on the door knob of the door that goes to the attic. Makes a great racket anytime anyone goes in the attic.

I much prefer the bottles of wine at the annual Niagara (Ontario) Wine-O.

This prize would be a little difficult to take home on the plane.