David Leggat: Untiring volunteers make the Games go round

COMMENT

Volunteers are the problem-solvers of the Olympics. These four-yearly sportathons would not happen without them, simple as that.

Just as you need athletes to run, swim, throw and leap, so you can't do without the tens of thousands of people who do it invariably just because they want to help out.

The difference is that the athletes bask in the limelight.

The same can't be said of the volunteers. The range of work is vast and often thankless.

Would you fancy being perched on a high chair in the middle of a belting hot square armed with a microphone reciting "turn left for the hockey, straight ahead for the baseball and right for the fencing, thank you", four times a minute for seven hours?

Or stand at the side of a building out the back of the badminton in case someone needs directions to the toilet?

Didn't think so.

They also have to do all the unpleasant stuff. "I'm sorry sir, you cannot go that way. You must go around the back of the stadium."

They are distinctive in their blue shorts or trackpants and short-sleeved shirts and, although overwhelmingly Greek, you can hear English, American, French and Spanish accents. Ages range from mid-teens to seventies. You see them on trains, in the street, at the venues.

Not everyone who applied was accepted. Two blokes on a train yesterday said they had offered their services but were rejected.

"You need to look like her," one of them quipped, pointing to a striking female volunteer across the aisle.

Andreas Doumas was wanted. By day he is a 50-something department head in a national bank. Then he hops into a telephone booth and emerges as the man behind the municipal information booth on a central Athens street corner.

"If all Greeks offered something the country would be 20 years ahead of where it is now," he said.

Then there's Aleka Louka, a beautician who insists she did not think twice when the call went out for Games volunteers. She works in the main Olympic stadium complex.

"I'm not in it for money," she said. "The satisfaction we get is enormous."

Theodora Tsaipoitis is a sign language interpreter.

"One day I went to the town hall and realised they didn't know much about sign language. It was a challenge, an opportunity to show that it is a language like any other."

It's not for everyone, this financially unrewarding work. But that's what makes it special for those who step up to do their bit for Games and country.