At the start of this month, at the age of 56, Mary O’Leary retired from her job as a maternity matron in a busy London hospital so she could become a volunteer at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The Games were not the only factor in her retirement, she says, but the fact that she would not otherwise have been able to take the necessary time off helped her make her decision.
Having first volunteered as a Games Maker at the London Olympics in 2012, O’Leary will fly to the Brazilian city on Wednesday to collect her bright yellow uniform and prepare for her new role. Once the games begin on 5 August, she will be shepherding press photographers at the weightlifting arena.
“I would never think of buying a ticket to see weightlifting,” she says, “but actually it’s probably going to be quite exciting at this level, and I’m not going to get this opportunity again.
“For me, the purpose of being part of the team is to contribute to what they need you to do. That is the joy of it.”
Four years after the Games Makers became some of the undisputed stars of the London Games, Rio has begun welcoming its own army of 50,000 volunteers, who it hopes can help overcome the troubled run-up to the event and deliver a sporting and organisational success to rival 2012.
While the large majority of them – 80% – are Brazilian, about 1,300 people will be travelling from the UK, at considerable personal expense, to spend three weeks holding pointy foam fingers, staffing bus stops, delivering results, answering press queries and performing several hundred other roles. For this they will be rewarded with their uniforms, daily meal vouchers and what O’Leary hopes will be “an experience I won’t be able to replicate”.
For many of the British volunteers, like O’Leary, this will be a familiar experience. “We learned a lot from London, about the process [of recruitment] and about the value of the volunteers to the games,” says Flavia Fontes, the manager of Rio 2016’s volunteer programme, who received 300,000 applications for the unpaid roles. Though her team will have representatives from 156 countries, and many volunteers will come from neighbouring South American nations and the US, the Rio organisers targeted some of their recruitment efforts at London volunteers, in the hope of benefiting from their expertise.
Among them will be Rosemary Head, 75, who will be a team leader at the print distribution centre at Barra Olympic Park. Having worked in the athletes’ transport mall in 2012 (“I had to check Usain Bolt’s accreditation and put him on a bus – best day of my life!”) she is undaunted about flying to Brazil to take up a role that will require her to work on alternate days until after midnight.
Head, from Laindon in Essex, has carried on volunteering since 2012, working as a park champion at the former Olympic Park in Stratford, and helping at a local nature reserve and nearby gardens. She “never had a proper education”, she says, but after 30 years working in customer services at Marks & Spencer is more than equipped to lead a team in Rio. “They asked me why I wanted to do it and I said it would be a dream come true, because I will be in my 76th year and I just want to represent the older generation from GB.”
Capturing and continuing that spirit of London 2012 has been the task of Join In, a charity set up to channel the Games Maker legacy into local sport in the UK. There are 3.2 million volunteers working in sport across the country – and many of the 2012 volunteers are among them, says Rebecca Birkbeck, the chief executive of Join In. The London Games also had a less measurable impact on the broader spirit of volunteering, she says. “It almost gave everyone permission to be very upbeat and positive and make volunteering a fun experience, and the impact of that on both retaining people and recruiting new volunteers can’t be underestimated.”
Fontes says Rio has sought to emulate some of that spirit, since Brazilians, for all their celebrated warmth, do not have an established volunteering culture. “We’ve been working on that a lot over the last two years: ‘This hospitality that you extend naturally, come and use it for the Games. Come and show the Brazilian way.’”
Twelve Britons helping out in Rio have been selected by Join In as “legacy volunteers”, tasked with spreading the word about the benefit of giving up their time. Among them is Chris Thorn, a landscape gardener from Chelmsford who arrived in Rio last week to staff a check-in desk in the athletes’ village, where competitors will start arriving over the weekend. It has been “really exciting” so far, he says, though some of the cultural differences – the touchy-feely friendliness of Brazilians, for instance – have taken a little readjustment.
Some of those who have worked with him in previous jobs would not recognise him now, Thorn says. “I’m quite smiley, cheery, generous, happy, want to go out of my way to help people. So that’s one thing I have enjoyed about doing this.”
And what does he hope to get out of it in exchange for his long hours without pay? “Just lifetime memories, I suppose.”
