ABSTRACT
Mega-events involving sport almost invariably rely on a large number of volunteers, and a key aspect of the resourcing for an Olympic Games event is ‘the donation of work of volunteers’ (Preuss, 2004: 182). The Olympic Games is the epitome of sporting mega-events – defined as ‘large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting) events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance’ (Roche, 2000: 1), yet many reviews barely mention volunteers, if at all (e.g. Horne and Manzenreiter, 2006; Poynter and MacRury, 2009; Sadd and Jones, 2009; Toohey and Veal, 2007). The study of event volunteering has grown (Auld et al., 2009) and there have been several studies of volunteers at relatively large events, but not as many as one might have expected covering the Olympic Games. Perhaps this is because of the difficulty for researchers in gaining access. A detailed assessment of the income and expenditure of the Olympic Games merely notes that the labour freely given by volunteers is ‘difficult to evaluate’ (Preuss, 2004: 182), while recognizing that their importance is ‘not only the work they do, but also the image of the host nation they create . . .’. Volunteers contribute significantly to the experience of participants and spectators through frequent interactions, and to the public image of the event. If the hours of work provided by the volunteers at the Sydney Games had been paid for it would have added AUD $140 million to the cost of the event – about 5 per cent of the organizing committee’s total Games expenditure (Haynes, 2001). Official reports of Olympic Games make little evaluation of the contribution of volunteers to the ‘event experience’. In contrast, Cashman’s (2006) account of the Sydney Olympic Games emphasized the importance of volunteers to the quality of the event and the emotional legacy, although this is hard to quantify. As a volunteer himself, Cashman had a strong emotional engagement with the Sydney Games and its potential volunteering legacy. While the use of volunteers at Olympic Games reduces costs and contributes to the ‘ambiance’ of the event, the Olympic Charter (International Olympic Committee, 2007), stipulating the conditions under which international Olympic committees (IOCs) organize the Games, does not explicitly require the use of volunteers. This has been a tradition consistent with the ethos of amateurism predominating at the inception of the modern Olympic Games in 1894, although London pioneered the use of volunteers at the 1948 Games. Volunteers are mentioned in the IOC Technical Manual on Workforce, which gives both guidance and contractual requirements
of the host city, and volunteers were the subject of an international symposium promoted by the IOC (Moragas et al., 1999). The Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 used 70,000 volunteers (Cashman, 2006), Athens 2004 used 65,000 (Karkatsoulis and Michalopoulos, 2005), Beijing 2008 used 100,000 (Auld et al., 2009) and the London 2012 Games will require 70,000 volunteers. Care has to be taken in comparing these figures, as information varies between different sources, including IOC documents, and volunteers may take different roles at different venues. Another source reports the Beijing Olympic Games as including not only 70,000 volunteers at the events themselves but also 1,000,000 ‘society’ volunteers, whose role was mainly related to ensuring good order in society at large, and 200,000 ‘cheerleading’ volunteers, whose role was to enhance the atmosphere of Olympic venues by cheering at appropriate times during events. Cultural traditions in different societies mean that the notion of ‘volunteering’ will also differ (for example, for China see Zhuang, 2010).
