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 charac-ter, 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). Offi-cial 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.
