More than a million people applied to be volunteers at the Beijing games. Only 70,000 eventually got the nod. It's easy to imagine the excitement that fired them to come to Beijing, be part of the games, and live the Olympic dream.
For many of the volunteers, the dream turns out to involve a lot of standing around, saying ‘Ni Hao,' and feeding bread into a toaster for hungry journalists. I imagine if they weren't so fired by national pride, some might think this volunteer thing isn't all it's cracked up to be.
But I've seen a couple of volunteers who have hit the jackpot. At the Birds' Nest stadium last night, it was their job to drive several rocket-shaped, remote-control cars around the inner field. It wasn't some ill-advised demonstration sport, but apparently a way to save some other poor volunteer walking seventy metres to bring the discus back to base after a hulking Hungarian had hurled it out on the grass.
And I'm not talking some functional, boring discus-bearer. I'm talking kitsch, 60s retro-futurism, Jetsons-style rocket cars, emblazoned in the Chinese colours of red and gold.
I suspect that with 90,000 spectators watching, these volunteers were on their best behaviour, and at time it looked like they were still figuring out the controls. But I wonder how long it will be until one of them, in a moment of pure unscripted passion, busts out a wheelie or does a burnout.
As a kid, remote controlled cars were about as good as it got, so I must admit I was fascinated. But there were other highlights - the magnificent beauty of the stadium, the fantastic atmosphere, Chinese fans cheering loudly as their 3,000m steeplechase runner came in last by a long way. Usain Bolt looked in ominous form, and Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia scored a stunning victory in the 10,000m.
As the night wore on, we were increasingly buried under a mound of paper (green games anyone?), distributed of course by a smiling volunteer. Results, statistics, quotes from the athletes - pearls of magical insight such as "I tried to run well" - which suggest that shoving a microphone in front of someone who's just run 3,000 metres is going to be a slow road to enlightenment.
And down the bottom of the page, three columns of essential information about the competitors, biographies (of course), the national Olympic committee of the competitor (essential) and horses. Yes, horses. I don't get it either.
The pages kept on coming and surprisingly, no athlete chose to exercise the horse option. Most events were heats though, and I imagine if you were going to go for a bit of equine performance enhancement, you'd keep your powder dry and save it for the finals.
In fact, given the pressure on Liu Xiang to win the 110 hurdles, and the signs that his rival Cuban Dayron Robles is in dangerous form, I wouldn't be surprised if come next Friday night, they have to wheel in the extra large, reinforced podium to award the gold to Liu and his steed, Hou Hai Silver.
