20 Riels - XXV Summer Olympic Games, Barcelona

Cambodia issued this piece in 1989 — three years before the Barcelona Games opened — at a moment when the country was still formally the People's Republic of Kampuchea, a Vietnamese-backed state unrecognized by much of the international community. The IOC did not seat a Cambodian delegation at Barcelona in 1992; the nation competed instead under a transitional authority following the 1991 Paris Peace Accords.

The coin was produced for the collector market, not domestic circulation, through arrangements typical of cash-strapped governments licensing their mint authority to foreign distributors in the 1980s.