The Chairs of Rio's Olympic Champions Have a Secret Second Life

Next time you feel you're moldering in your office chair, consider that it may secretly have a glamorous history.

Since well before the Rio Olympics began, an Australian company has been lining up second homes for the 135,000 chairs, 350 portable massage beds, 900 bar stools, 20,000 beds, 102,000 electrical items, 600 small safes—even the 2,500 stainless steel trash cans—that experienced brief moments of glory (or infamy) in the athletes' village and venues.

Next time you feel you're moldering in your office chair, consider that it may secretly have a glamorous history.

Since well before the Rio Olympics began, an Australian company has been lining up second homes for the 135,000 chairs, 350 portable massage beds, 900 bar stools, 20,000 beds, 102,000 electrical items, 600 small safes—even the 2,500 stainless steel trash cans—that experienced brief moments of glory (or infamy) in the athletes' village and venues.

But if you want a white plastic folding chair Michael Phelps may have glowered in, you'll have to take a full 40-foot container load of chairs. And you'll have competition from companies around the world that often buy the goods for resale. On Wednesday, for example, with one day left in the three-day auction period, there were 14 bids—with $5,136 the highest shown—for a lot of 4,000 of those chairs valued at $76,000. (That top bid would mean $1.28 per chair.)

Rio is the sixth Olympic Games for which RGS Events, a family-owned company in Melbourne, Australia, has provided and disposed of fixtures, furniture, and equipment, starting with Sydney in 2000. This year it's partnering with U.S. online liquidator B-Stock Solutions to get rid of some of the goods. The majority of buyers who've bid on the site to "Buy a Piece of the Rio 2016 Olympics" have been from the U.S., but sales have also been made to buyers in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and the United Kingdom, said Howard Rosenberg, B-Stock's chief executive.

Many products used for those 17 highly televised days eventually go to party-rental companies, furniture resellers, schools, janitorial companies, and event-planning outfits—plus "scrappy entrepreneurial types" who go out and make a market for the items, said Rosenberg. He said "hundreds of 40-foot containers of stuff" have been sold. Paul Ramler, chief executive of RGS Events, said more than 90 percent of the 1.3 million or so items from Rio have been spoken for.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-18/the-chairs-of-rio-s-olympic-champions-have-a-secret-second-life