The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have kicked off to a raging start. I mean, beheading Marie Antoinette? Gojira? Snoop Dogg? Paris sure knows how to party. However, a big part of the Olympic Games has always been marketing, which is why automakers have occasionally offered games-themed editions of their cars. While some have certainly been better than others, the Buick Regal Olympic Edition could very well be the weirdest Olympic-themed car of all time, but not for the reason you’d expect.
Believe it or not, Buick has a long history of Olympic tie-ins, such as the pinstriped and embroidered 1984 Century Olympia, the similarly gussied-up 1988 LeSabre Olympic Edition, and the bodaciously burgundy 1996 Regal Olympic Edition. For the 2000 Sydney Games, however, Buick went all-in, with a rather different colorway than white or burgundy.
Yep, the star color of this Regal was gold, because that’s the medal everyone wants. Sure, you could also get it in silver and graphite for a stealthier image, but when it comes to slightly tacky special-edition models, I say go big or go home. Regardless of preferred color, you’d get beige cladding, a grey grille and center caps, special floor mats, an eight-speaker Monsoon audio system, a sunroof, a six-way power passenger seat, taupe leather, an auto-dimming rearview mirror, and some Olympic badging. Classy. However, none of that is what makes the car weird.
For a start, this Olympic Edition Regal was a collaboration with fashion designer Joseph Abboud. In hindsight, it’s bizarre to see a gold Buick Regal be part of a dapper fashion mogul’s work, but the 2000s brought about all sorts of weirdness in fashion, like skinny eyebrows. Oh, but it gets weirder.
See, the full title of this car is the 2001 Buick Regal Olympic Edition, and if you don’t remember the 2001 Olympics, there’s a reason for that. See, 2001 wasn’t a year in which the games were held, so Buick arrived to the party one model year late to celebrate the Sydney games. Huh?
This discrepancy all comes down to how model years are typically assigned. Usually, it’s an unspoken rule that unless a vehicle is all-new early in the year, the new model year will likely start to roll around in late summer. Buick, being a traditional brand bought by Americans who attended the signing of the Declaration of Independence, teed up 2001 Regal production to kick off around September 2000, just in time for the games in Sydney.
Of course, since few people actually document model year changeover times, this little tidbit has largely been lost to history, meaning a bunch of Buicks seem to celebrate the Olympics one year late. The fact that it also features the name of a fashion designer merely adds to the mystique. So, if you happen across an Olympic-badged Y2K-era Regal while out and about, now you know it’s a 2001 model and not a 2000 model. How delightfully boring is that?
(Photo credits: Buick)
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Here are Olympic car ads from 1984, including a couple Buick Electra ads, a really cool Subaru Olympic Ski Team ad, and a “we aren’t going to pay a cent to the IOC” unofficial Olympic ad from Toyota. https://youtu.be/9ItD0YE9J2A
Ah corporate tie-ins! The only reason the Olympics exists in the modern age.
That said, I do love the “SkyDome Opening Ceremony” grade lameness on display here and would take this over that Iron Man Hyundai any day.
Especially when you consider how bullet-proof some of these old Buick sedans were.
The modern Olympics are about enriching the IOC, that seems to be it.
Oh come on now, they also give us the best play-at-home game of them all: “Who’s more corrupt?” FIFA vs the IOC edition.
The organization that gave the world United Passions will never be beaten.
Haha, never heard of this before, adding it to the list for bad movie night!
Only FIFA could release a movie hyping themselves up right as they were exposed for massive corruption
Buick was such a dead brand at this point – Century, Regal, LeSabre, Park Avenue. Pretty sure that was it in 2001. They wouldn’t get great additions like the Rendezvous, Terraza (who forgot about that one??) and Rainier until a little later in the decade.
I had a Rendezvous, and let me just say how terrible of a vehicle that was. This vehicle had more electrical gremlins than a toaster in a bathtub. It is the very reason why I will no longer buy a GM.
I had Buicks from that era and one of them had the weirdest electrical issues. The left blinker stalled the car, lost all my gauges occasionally and it ate window motors every year or two but man it kept running though anything.
Lost all my oil and had to put in the wrong weight? It’s fine. Only 5 of 6 cylinders compressing? Worked.
come to Europe, and check out all the tie-in: Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Bon Jovi edition mk3 Golfs, Sweden Rock ID.Buzz Cargo, Volvo Ocean Races, Peugot 206 Roland Garos, etc.
My parents had an 84 Buick Century. It wasn’t the fancy Olympic model but it had a Los Angeles 1984 Olympics sticker in the rear passenger side window.
For the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona Holden created a way of incentivising Australian athletes to win a gold medal, if you won Holden gifted you your very own “Golden Holden” a 1992 VP Commodore, strictly a base model complete with the asthmatic Buick derived 3.6L V6 and 4 speed auto, but with a metallic gold paint job as seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0svMBDsARE0
I remember them being popular at the time, but like most Commodores of that era I haven’t seen one in over 20 years.
Do you mean 3.8L?
Also Holden had the Olympic Edition VTs from the year 2000 for Sydney.
Yes, right you are. It was a 3.9L, the smaller V6 came later on.
I forgot about the Olympic VT’s. Were they the cars that Holden loaned officials to get around in during the games?
Oh boy. There was one of these that was haunting the Minneapolis/St. Paul area 15 years ago. It had some ugly, oversized aftermarket wheels on it, so I assumed it was a custom paint job that was also tacky. That gold and silver two-tone paint is way uglier in person than in these pictures. Yuck.
I took the special badge off of a team Canada edition Chevy I found in a Detroit area junkyard a few years ago. I don’t even remember if it was an Impala or a Malibu but it was for sure one of those and from the late 2000s.
It’s just a little badge that was stuck on the c pillar trim that had a maple leaf above the olympic rings and “Team Canada Edition” printed on it. I remember looking it up at the time and didn’t find much info on them, I kind of have a feeling it might have been one of those special edition things that dealers just make up on their own and not an actual Chevy thing
It was a real thing, GM advertised it pretty heavily. I think the first-gen Equinox was the most heavily advertised of them but they also did a Cobalt. Weirdly, both of those models were on the way out when they did it in 2008.
GM’s done a bunch of Olympic (and adjacent) tie-ins up here. I want to say every single MY88 had a little Calgary Olympics decal in the rear quarter window (in addition to the obligatory actual special editions), although late 80’s GMs were already getting scarce around the turn of the millennium.
I know for sure that GM provided the support vehicles for the 2015 Pan-Am games in Toronto, which can be identified by a similar B-pillar badge, I think they did similar for the Vancouver Olympics.
Too bad they didn’t have Sydney (or Rio) Olympics in the southern hemisphere’s actual summer 😛
The supercharger could certainly give you gold medal performance speed LOL
Any Audi Olympic editions? I mean, their logo is the olympic rings!
No – but a couple Audis did climb Olympic ski jumps to demonstrate Quattro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faiFfBxhT8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25u80sQkkkM
And I thought the weirdest was the 1980 Volga M24-10 Olympic police cars, which were built for the Moscow Militsiya to transport the torch through the city. Featured metallic gold paint, wide whitewall tires, extra chrome trim, bigger radiators, and accelerator pedals recalibrated with extra resistance, and an encrypted radio telephone between the front seats. Might not count, since they only made 10 and they all went to the police, but GAZ did hype it up a lot in promotional materials
Thanks. I googled it, and the only image I could find was of a 1/43rd model. But it was sufficient!
1980 Olympics in Moscow? How come I don’t remember tha…oh yeah, that’s why. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I feel like we need an Autopian follow-up article to document ALL the Olympic-edition vehicles ever sold. These are the things that need memorialized for future internet-visitors.
There’s something so perfect about Buick being a major producer of these. The brand that people usually have a hard timing naming more than one of its products producing vehicles commemorating something most Americans care about only sporadically and with regard to things like medal counts or celebrities.
We need a whole series of these wacky turn-of-the-century-era GM tie-ins. I vote for the Chevy Venture Warner Bros. Edition next.
I like this. The auto companies were really onto something, as today, the whole lazy “collab” thing – take an existing product, put another company name on it, and maybe change its color and viola! instant mark-up – is everywhere.
Be on the look out for the upcoming Kia Carnival Netflix Edition, which will have sub editions such as the Stranger Things Edition, the Squid Game Edition, and the Ozark Edition ( it’s just a rebadged Honda Odyssey)
I would love to meet the few people out there (there must be some, right?) who so loved whatever the tie-in was that they bought the vehicle and still have it b/c they never got tired of it.
“Damn straight I still have my Wham! edition Nissan Pulsar! Best band ever!”
I always thought that one made sense for a family car. Although if I remember correctly the “Warner Brothers Edition” didn’t have like Bugs Bunny inside the car, just “WB” logos on it.
Made more sense than the Mercury Villager Nautica Edition. Although I guess Ford had a long history of clothing designer tie ins. Eddie Bauer Explorers, Cartier Lincolns.
Let’s not forget the gorgeous Bill Blass Lincolns.
And you’re right, although they didn’t need to waste a tie-in on a donor vehicle from Nissan, with the Nautica Edition. That was the part that made the least sense, to me.
I never understood that MY malarkey you have Americans.
My uncle bought a car in December 2023 and that is a 2023 car. Not a MY2026 or whatever weird way you have of counting car years.
The same reason magazines come out a 1-4 months before their printed month. Gotta be first!
What’s a “Magazine”?
*ducks*
Exactly