Volunteers add colors to Beijing Olympic Winter Games

By Zou Xiang, Source：People’s Daily

Energetic, warm, friendly, and considerate, volunteers serving the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing, capital of China, have added brilliance and colors to the splendor of the Games.

An Olympic volunteer provides transportation information for a foreign journalist at the service desk of the Main Media Center (MMC) for the Beijing Winter Olympics, Feb. 3, 2022. (People’s Daily Online/Chen Shangwen)

Olympic volunteers are considered the business card of Olympic host cities and their services important guarantee of the success of Olympic Games. At the Beijing 2022, volunteers have impressed the world with their friendly attitude and positive spirit.

A total of 19,000 volunteers, who have been selected from more than one million applicants, are providing services covering a dozen of fields at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, including sports competition, venue management, language services, and media operations. Ninety-four percent of these volunteers are under 35 years old.

From the Main Media Center (MMC) and the competition venues for the Games to neighborhoods in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, the co-host city of the Beijing 2022, volunteers are seen in various spots related to the sports event.

Besides the 19,000 volunteers selected to serve the Winter Olympics, about 200,000 city volunteers are helping maintain traffic order, provide information consulting services, and promote civilized behavior in Beijing, becoming a highlight of the city.

Before taking up their posts at the Games, volunteers have gone through multiple procedures and a series of training.

Olympic volunteers help foreign journalists at the Photo Help Desk of the Main Media Center (MMC) for the Beijing Winter Olympics, Feb. 3, 2022. (People’s Daily Online/Chen Shangwen)

Extensive recruitment, rigorous selection and scientific training are essential for building a team of volunteers with high comprehensive quality, strong service capability and a high level of professional competence that are able to provide services for competitions, receive guests properly, and help with venue operations and display of the Chinese culture.

To guarantee the professionalism of volunteers, the Beijing Organising Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (BOCOG) planned over 20 required courses for them. Before they officially started serving the event, volunteers had completed a four-stage training session, during which they learned basic knowledge and skills needed for volunteer services, specialized knowledge and professional skills required for their posts, information and knowledge about the venues and competitions they serve, as well as knowledge, skills, and working methods necessary for the execution of their duties.

Through numerous training exercises, volunteers have sharpened their service capabilities and made smile the best name card of the host cities. They have fully showed the world Chinese people’s hospitality and good manners.

The Winter Olympics has not only provided a platform for athletes from all over the world to compete and strive for excellence, but encouraged more people to pay attention to, support and participate in winter sports.

Since Beijing won the bid to host the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games together with Zhangjiakou in 2015, over 346 million Chinese people have participated in winter sports, turning China’s vision of getting 300 million people involved in ice and snow sports into reality.

People are pursuing a shared Olympic dream and a winter sports dream with their best endeavors, from athletes who have practiced hard and tried their best in competitions to medical team that safeguards athletes’ safety, and from journalists who constantly enrich and innovate content and ways of mass communication to ice-making team and snow-making team which have spent years trying to make perfect ice and snow for the Olympics.

The hard work of every individual at his or her ordinary position at the Beijing 2022 has eventually made the Games a remarkable sports event.

The Beijing Winter Olympics gives people across the globe a window into China. Colorful Chinese elements have been widely spread through the platform of the Games: the outfits of volunteers at the opening ceremony of the Olympics are decorated with Chinese paper-cutting patterns; the signs held by the guide during the parade of athletes combine the elements of snowflake and Chinese knot; and children who sang the Olympic Anthem at the opening ceremony wore tiger-themed clothes and shoes, as the year 2022 is the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac.

Thanks to volunteers of the Beijing 2022, the world’s first “dual Olympic city”, Beijing, which boasts both ancient and modern charm, is better understood by foreigners.

Volunteers’ dedication, together with heartwarming stories behind venue construction, Chinese people’s progress toward prosperity by developing winter sports industry and athletes’ pursuit of excellence in competitions, has shown the world a positive, prosperous and open China.

Beijing delivered a splendid Summer Olympics to the world in 2008; 14 years later, it is trying its best again to bring Olympic athletes and personnel an enjoyable Olympic experience at the 2022 Winter Olympics.