5000 Kip Olympics, Piedfort

Piedfort coins — struck at double the standard planchet thickness — have been a specialty of proof issues since the French revived the format in the 1970s, and Laos adopted the convention for select commemoratives through the Monnaie de Paris, which has handled much of the country's commemorative output since the LPDR's early years. The 1999 Olympics issue was produced in very limited numbers, as piedfort strikes almost always are, making surviving examples genuinely scarce rather than artificially so.