Serving as an Olympic volunteer can be a gateway to a lifetime Olympic passion. In the spirit of this passion, several young organizers for Beijing 2022 are vowing to give their best for a successful winter Games to mark Chinese Youth Day falling on May 4.
Friday marked the anniversary of the May 4th Movement, a patriotic campaign that started from universities and was launched in 1919 by young Chinese to fight imperialism and feudalism. May 4th later was established as Youth Day in 1949 by the Chinese government.
Wang Hao, 30, a staffer with the Human Resources Department of the Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (BOCOG), expressed his will to better facilitate a wonderful delivery of Beijing 2022.
"My confidence comes from a staff-sharing practice," said Wang, who volunteered for Beijing 2008 Olympics when in university.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) have deployed the concept of knowledge transfer systems, which are used to share previous host cities' best practices in order to help the next host city in all possible ways.
Thanks to this program, BOCOG sent 254 staff to Pyeongchang 2018 to work with the local organizing committee or learn from the frontlines as an official observer. 41 organizers were on secondment for post practice in different positions during the Games in Pyeongchang.
"The secondment program was problem-oriented, so I should say that staying in my comfort zone was never an option. We all kept our minds on the details," said Wang Hao, a member on secondment with the human resources group of 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
"We were fully prepared before heading for PyeongChang, so we can could take every chance to learn first-hand experience related to preparations and game-time operations," said Wang.
Like others, Wang brought home notes, videos and knowhow about operations during his one-month secondment, and made three reports to the brainstorming sessions launched by the organizers of Beijing 2022.
Beijing will make history as the first city in the world to host both the Olympic Summer Games and the Olympic Winter Games. Wang was hired by the organizing committee after Beijing was successful in its bid for the 2022 Winter Games in 2015.
"The past two years were truly eye-opening for me, because I have had the privilege to learn from elite organizers around me," Wang said.
In early April, the BOCOG held a welcome meeting for new university graduates. Altogether, 15 graduates out of 1,500 were admitted by the BOCOG.
Wu Yujia, one of the 15 new comers, will work in the Legal Affairs Department of the BOCOG.
"It is a big step for me to join the BOCOG, and so this Youth Day will be truly memorable. I will make myself familiar with my responsibilities as soon as possible," said Wu, a law graduate with Renmin University of China.
The winter games will be different for Beijing than the summer Olympiad, and for this reason, a lot of complex preparatory work is ahead. But these young organizers will not complain. They are happy for the chance to be a part of history.
