Rio 2016 organizers are struggling to manage their corps of more than 56,000 unpaid volunteers, leading to reports of unhelpful directions, conflicting advice and lack of consistent rules at security checkpoints.
Organizing committee spokesman Mario Andrada said the volunteers are not badly trained in general but have been assigned to different locations after others failed to report for work.
“There’s no lack of training,” Andrada said. “We’ve probably had to move them around more than we wanted. You know, the level of volunteers that give up, the people who don’t show up the next day, it’s a bit higher than we expected. In some areas we have to move them around to cover the other structures, and as a matter of fact, we keep getting more and more volunteers because we need more of them.”
On Monday afternoon, Louis Vega, Dow Chemical Co. chief of staff and vice president of Olympic and sports solutions, arrived late to a meeting after struggling to navigate the Olympic Park. Volunteers could not help him find a credentials-only path into the media building, he said.
“Normally volunteers know the venues inside and out,” Vega said.
Other sources have passed along anecdotes of volunteers apparently not understanding security protocol at the media and athlete villages. Reporters are often given conflicting advice on which bus is going where from major venues.
Andrada said the volunteer corps is improving and will get better as they spend more time at their assigned venues.
