Abstract
The hosting of the London 2012 Olympic Games was seen as an opportunity to harness the enthusiasm of the 70,000 volunteers involved and to provide a post-event volunteer legacy. A total of 77 individuals who had acted as volunteers in London 2012 were contacted approximately four years after the Games and agreed to complete a web-based open-ended survey. The participants were asked to indicate their level of current volunteering engagement and whether volunteering at the Games had an impact on their current volunteering levels. The study found that the London Olympics were the first volunteer experience for most of the volunteers who completed the survey, with the main motivation to volunteer being anything related to the Olympic Games. Just over half of the respondents are currently volunteering. Lack of time is shown to be the main barrier towards further volunteering commitment. Only half of respondents had been contacted by a volunteering scheme after London 2012. The implications of the findings for a potential volunteering legacy are then explored.
Highlights
The Olympic Games are one of many proceedings that are deemed ‘mega-events’, due to the large scale upon which they are held [1]
With 70,000 volunteers acting as ‘Games Makers’, as they were known throughout the sixteen-day event in 2012, it was of vital importance to ensure that their enthusiasm could be harnessed to provide a social legacy of sports volunteering in the local communities
This is important as it shows a large degree of overlap between volunteer activities and motivations, and hints at the potential for transferring volunteer efforts across activities, helping to create a volunteer legacy from the London 2012 Olympics [26,30]
Summary
The Olympic Games are one of many proceedings that are deemed ‘mega-events’, due to the large scale upon which they are held [1]. Mega-events are defined as specially constructed and staged large-scale international, cultural, or sport events in which the majority of world states participate. These short term events are often utilised with the aspiration to create long-term post-event impacts for the hosting nation [2]. The hosting of the London 2012 Olympic Games intended to deliver a great level of sport to the host city, and promised to provide a legacy for the years to come [3,4,5]. Evidence suggests that there was a lack of precise objectives on how the legacy aspiration to ‘inspire a generation’ to take part in sport and volunteering [8] could be realised following the Games [9].
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