Finally! My first shift as a volunteer for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics was yesterday. I am assigned to Event Services as a Host. I guess with my multiple years working in retail and customer service, they figured I would be great as part of the "face of the games" team.
Since the Oympics have not officially started, volunteers were only required to secure facilities for athletes to train, that is be access monitors. I am assigned to the Pacific Coliseum, the venue for figure skating and short track speed skating. I am not a fan of figure skating, but love sports that involve speed.
Yesterday I went to work in the morning, then got off at noon, had lunch and showed up for my shift at 3pm. Short track speed skating teams from Japan, Germany and Italy were already in the venue and practicing. I watched Germany and Italy; they were tall and lean, and when skating, were low and gliding so smoothly on the ice. There were additional team that showed up later, but I only saw the Polish team.
We were assigned posts to ensure only those with the proper accreditation were allowed past the access points. I almost stopped the coach of the Italy team from coming in! There are lots of things to check on an accreditation pass: the photo must match the person wearing the pass, the venue code must match the one they're trying to access and the access code must match where they are trying to access.
This is what I learned about the Olympic access monitoring system:
I am assigned Pacific Coliseum, so have "PAC" as my venue. I am in operations, so have a red stripe on my pass. There's additional arm bands for the volunteers: yellow for access monitors and red for medical personnel.
Coaches and athletes have a blue stripe for access to field of play, "PAC" for the venue, "ST" for short track and "2" for athlete only zones.
Media have "5" for media zones and some people are wearing body bibs as support for media or athletes. NBC is already here in trailers.
The sport volunteers get to help move athlete belongings from one end of the rink to the other, their skate guards and clothing. I guess athletes enter from one side and exit on the other. There's huge padding all the way around for falls.
It's all very interesting how the Olympics came up with all this stuff.
The ice gets changed over once a day between figure skating and short track. Apparently it only takes 15 minutes to change the thickness of 40cm! I want to watch that.
In the meantime, I met some interesting volunteers. One guy volunteered for the Asian games about a year ago in Qatar and said the monitoring system is the same. He was assigned to assist the head of Myanmar! How cool is that?
To bide the time, another volunteer and I were trying to figure out all the country flags. You think you know them all until they're side by side!
The one highlight was that I got my food allergies addressed for dinner. They feed the volunteers, but with my allergies to gluten, egg and dairy, it is can be quite difficult to get food that meets the criteria. It was a gluten free pizza with tomato and mushroom, no cheese. It was actually quite good, but no one was able to tell me where to get some commercially.
My shift ended at 10pm, because no more teams were coming in. I was scheduled till midnight, so that was another bonus. The bus came right away and I was home in 15 min. Our accreditation pass is good for free travel on translink.
Next shift, Sunday at 5am.
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