Olympic champions’ chairs have a secret second life

The next time you feel you’re mouldering 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, and even the 2,500 stainless steel rubbish bins 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.

Rio is the sixth Olympic Games for which RGS Events, a familyowned company in Melbourne has provided and disposed of fixtures, furniture, and equipment, starting with Sydney in 2000.

This year it’s partnering with United States online liquidator B-Stock Solutions to get rid of some of the goods. Most of the buyers who have bid on the site have been from the US, but sales have also been made to Australia, Canada, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Spain and the United Kingdom, says Howard Rosenberg, B-Stock’s chief executive.

Many of the products used during the Games eventually go to party rental companies, furniture resellers, schools, janitorial companies, and event planning outfits – plus ‘‘scrappy entrepreneurial types’’, Rosenberg says. He says ‘‘hundreds’’ of container loads of stuff have been sold.

Paul Ramler, chief executive of RGS Events, says more than 90 per cent of the 1.3 million or so items from Rio have been spoken for.

Some of the products wind up at other major sporting events. Many from the 2012 London Olympics, for instance, spent 16 months stored in 400 containers at the port in Grangemouth, Scotland before being used at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

After Glasgow, some of those products took part in the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England, after which RGS donated more than £2 million worth of well-travelled sofas, wardrobes, beanbags and more to needy families in Glasgow.