The true Olympic spirit

Spent Friday at London’s ExCeL venue in the Docklands, meeting some of the 7,000 volunteers who will be driving cars during the Olympics and Paralympics as they went through their training. Their passengers will be everyone from medal-winning sports stars, no-hopers from far-flung corners of the globe, or any of the thousands of Games officials. They will be ferried between airports, accommodation and venues in a fleet of BMW 3 and 5-Series cars. These drivers get nothing for doing the job – no payment, event tickets or benefit of any sort – yet are happy to sacrifice up to 20 days of their summer, just to be able to say they were involved. They are generally time-rich people – the retired, business owners, etc – and most live in the south-east for obvious reasons. But many have come from further a field, including one lady from Australia. She was involved in the Sydney Olympics and apparently loved it so much she wanted to do it again in London. If anything sums up the spirit of this summer of sport, it’s these people. Good luck to them all. I hope it gives them great stories to tell.