"The Role of Volunteers in the Preparation and Holding of the Olympic Games"

This paper studies the Olympic volunteering Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2014. In practice, the organization of modern mega- events, volunteers play an important role, they are part of the organizing committees. Taking into account the context of the project activities there is a situation in which the volunteers are forced to combine the principles of volunteering with rigid administrative frameworks organizing games. In the frames of research the empirical study was conducted. It includes interviews with volunteers, who participated in games, the analyze of online communities in the social networks and in the official website. Results of the analysis of the data depict that the volunteers realize that they are free labor, but they also note their contribution to the atmosphere of the event. This work can initiate investigations of the Olympic volunteer movement in Russia and continue the research tradition of studying the Olympics, their organization and heritage in countries hosting the competition, on the other hand this research can give a rise to consideration of Olympic volunteering as one of the "new" areas of volunteering.