A milestone in Olympic volunteering

Volunteers have long been an integral part of the Olympic Games and are vital to the organisation of the event. Many thousands of them take part in each Olympic Games, performing a wide range of duties, from ticket inspectors and uniform distributors to interpreters and doping control officers. The application process is extensive. For instance, some 250,000 people applied to volunteer for London 2012 and more than 600,000 for Beijing 2022.

Volunteer selection and training processes are now standard for all Olympic Games. These can be traced back to Helsinki 1952, a landmark event in the development of Olympic volunteer services.

Before World War Two, Olympic Games organising committees typically relied on support from the host nation’s armed forces and boy scout brigades. With a relatively modest number of participating nations, athletes and events compared to today, this informal approach to organising volunteer services proved adequate.

However, the Olympic Games expanded after the global conflict, with more countries seeking to take part and more events on the Olympic programme. This expansion brought greater organisational complexities for organising committees and placed additional pressure on host cities to find and train adequate numbers of volunteers. London 1948 saw the creation of the first Olympic volunteer force, and four years later the Helsinki 1952 Organising Committee embarked on a thorough and ground-breaking volunteer selection process, inviting applications from people with widely differing backgrounds and skill sets.

Among these pioneering applicants were civil servants, officials from Finnish amateur sports organisations, and members of expert committees, Olympic youth organisations and citizens’ groups. Those selected then underwent training designed to prepare them for the various services they would provide at Helsinki 1952, ranging from translation to pitch maintenance. In the process, a solid foundation was laid for Olympic volunteer training, with further enhancements and improvements made in the years that followed. At the Olympic Winter Games 1960, for example, the Organising Committee became the first to recruit volunteers for transport services.

Women, who had been largely underrepresented in previous Olympic volunteer groups, were much more visible at Helsinki 1952, where they accounted for 547 of the 2,192 volunteers. In the years since, women’s involvement in Olympic volunteering programmes has played its part in helping to make gender equality a reality in the Olympic Movement.