2008 Olympics Information

China, America, and the Olympics:  Two Countries, One World
By Susan Brownell
Fulbright Research Scholar at Beijing Sports University

Part II:  Olympic Volunteers in the U.S. and China

A large number of volunteers is absolutely essential to the organization of today’s Olympic Games.  Without their free labor, the Olympic Games – as costly as they already are - might be impossibly expensive.  The use of volunteers to run sports events has a long history in the West and is intertwined with Western sport culture.  Olympic sports are a Western invention introduced into China at the end of the nineteenth century, but China’s own sports culture has evolved very differently.  Therefore, when the Olympic Games were awarded to China for the first time, their organization – and in particular the organization of the volunteers – was very different from the Western tradition.  A comparison of Olympic volunteerism in the U.S. and China is a useful way of understanding the different structures of American and Chinese society.  It also points out the particular challenges that China faced in organizing the Games.

The U.S. “Volunteer” Culture

America has hosted eight Olympic Games, more than any other nation – four summer Games (1904, 1932, 1984, 1996) and four winter Games (1932, 1960, 1980, 2002).  Olympics are comparatively easy and inexpensive for the U.S. to organize because organizing committees build on a base of expert volunteers that already exists in the local club sports system.  Sports clubs (not to be confused with professional sports teams) are generally non-profit organizations with a tax-exempt status whose members do not receive salaries for their work.  In addition to having a “non-profit” legal status, a sports club must be approved by a sport governing body to organize or compete in approved competitions.  In the Olympic system, the governing body is affiliated nationally with the U.S. Olympic Committee (itself a non-profit organization), such as USA Track and Field or USA Basketball. 

On a daily basis across the U.S., club sports competitions are being organized in the same way as U.S. Olympic Games, but on a much smaller scale.  A club forms an organizing committee with different subcommittees to supervise different aspects of organizing the event (such as registration, transportation, or awards).  The volunteer committee recruits volunteers to run the competition and assigns them to subcommittees. The volunteer workers are typically either adult athletes or parents of young athletes.  In some sports, the judges, officials or referees are paid professionals; in others, they are unpaid volunteers. 

When a U.S. city decides to host a national championship event, it will be organized by either one large club or several local clubs in collaboration.  When a U.S. city hosts an Olympic Games, it does the same thing but on a much larger scale.  The organizing committee itself largely consists of paid professionals, but the structure below it draws from experienced volunteers from that city, as well as others from around the country.  Advertisements soliciting volunteer applicants are placed in national magazines of the different sports.  The organizing committee can draw upon a huge pool of people who not only have years of expertise in their own sport, but also have high-level professional skills in their daily jobs.  An example is my own sister, who was a volunteer for the equestrian events in the 1996Atlanta Games.  She had not only competed at the national level in equestrian sports for over ten years, but she had also earned an MBA and was working in management. 

China’s “Olympic Challenge”

The organization of an Olympic Games in the U.S. emerges organically out of an existing sport system, variations of which are found throughout the West.  China’s own sports system, however, is very different and presented the country with a challenge:  How to recruit and train thousands of volunteers from scratch?

The backbone of China’s sport system is the 3,000 sports schools run by the State Sport General Administration, and the sport and recreational activities organized by its local branches or those of the Ministry of Culture.  Chinese sports events are run by paid professionals who work for the government, and the judges, referees, and officials involved are also all paid.   where is it becoming harder to recruit volunteers from increasingly busy Americans (particularly with so many women now in the work force), China’s professional system ensures local sports clubs can thrive.  In addition, today’s sports increasingly require professional skills in law, computers, marketing, and publicity that volunteers who are simply parents of athletes may not possess. 

The challenge is in the numbers.  For the Beijing Olympics, there will be between 70,000 to 80,000 “Games-times volunteers” – those who run the sports events and work at the venues.  Although many of the Chinese sports professionals were transferred to the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) on short- or long-term bases, there were not nearly enough of them.  BOCOG needed another pool of volunteers and – since they would not necessarily be sports experts – a way to train them.  After much discussion, BOCOG decided to recruit university students.

As it happened, China already had a nationwide system for recruiting university volunteers for social service:  the Communist Youth League system, with a branch in every Chinese university.  It was the Communist Youth League, for example, that recruited and organized volunteers for disaster relief efforts during the February 2008 heavy snows in southern China.   Moreover, university students are logistically easier to train through lectures on the Olympic Games, volunteerism, and other relevant topics.  Another very important issue for the Beijing Olympics, which U.S.-organized Olympics did not face, was the need for volunteers with good foreign language skills, especially English.  BOCOG’s volunteer selection process therefore included written and oral English tests, as well as interviews by the Youth League branches.  The largest pool of potential volunteers with functional English was university students. 

While U.S. Olympic volunteers had already emerged from the proving ground of local sports, the Chinese volunteers had to prove themselves by working at test events before the Olympic Games.  BOCOG decided to use twice as many volunteers in the test events as would be needed for the Olympic Games and retain the best based on their performance. 

Chinese volunteers were put through much more intensive training than those for the Atlanta Games, at great expense.  Because BOCOG felt that this was a good opportunity to educate the next generation of China’s young people, Beijing volunteers attended lectures on Olympic history and values, the structure of the Olympic Movement, Chinese sport history, environmental preservation, and a host of other topics.  By contrast, when I asked my sister whether the volunteers for the equestrian events in Atlanta received any education in Olympic history and ideals, she replied that they only received training specific to their event.  Some of the Atlanta volunteers arrived at the Horse Park for the first time only a few days before the Games.  Of course, since America has hosted eight Olympic Games, Olympic history and ideals have already entered American popular culture, and American volunteers started with a deeper background than their Chinese counterparts. On the other hand, most Americans know more about Olympic heroes than they do about the ideals and structure of the Olympic Movement. 

Blazing New Trails

Given its different history, culture, and social structure, China’s organization of the Olympic Games could not be based on a Western model.  Thus, BOCOG was operating in new territory and had to design a new model step-by-step as it proceeded.  The challenge of using university students is that a lack of real-world experience could mean they lack problem-solving ability.  With the Olympics opening ceremony rapidly approaching, in the spring BOCOG started to re-think the policy of largely using university volunteers and recruited more from other social circles. 

Ms. Brownell is the author of Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.