RIO DE JANEIRO _ One of the most sought-after items among journalists inside the Olympic Park in Rio costs practically nothing to make. You can often find them littering the ground in a parking lot in the United States.
But there is something of a black market in bottle caps _ so much so that I have taken to keeping 3-4 of them around at all times in my backpack.
The reason is simple. At the Olympic venues, for vague "safety reasons," they will sell you bottled water or a bottled soft drink but they will insist on taking off the cap first. Then they hand you your drink, which is fine if you plan on gulping it all down right then but not so fine if you are trying to balance a computer, an iPhone and a tape recorder as well.
The first time I found this out I had made a 30-minute near-sprint across the vast Olympic Park from one event to the other. I bought three bottled drinks (they don't sell fountain drinks at the venues at all). They were two bottled waters and a bottled Coke. The woman who sold them to me insisted, in Portuguese and by demonstrating, that the tops were coming off first.
So there I was, trying to hold three drinks and all my stuff at once.
I solved this by gulping down one of the waters and managed to balance the other two without spilling them onto my computer. Ever since then, I have kept bottle caps around (from drinks I bought in other places). And I have seen several journalists trading them back and forth like pins.
