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Counting Down to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

As we count down the hours until the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, we thought we’d take a look at past Olympics games to mark the occasion....

The oldest Olympic stamp in the collection is a 2 cent stamp from the 1932 Winter Games held in Lake Placid, New York. This piece of postage pictures a ski jumper flying over the mountains, was criticized for the skier’s unnatural position, according to the exhibit. (Funky form usually costs you some serious point deductions.) Personally, I’m more distracted by the fact that postage only cost 2 cents....

And few hockey fans could forget one of the most teams to make a U.S. Postage stamp: the 1980 U.S. Hockey team, who beat out the favored Soviet Union for the gold medal in an underdog victory that would become known as the “Miracle on Ice.”...

Read entire article at Smithsonian Magazine