It's Snow Joke

Birmingham March 2018, IAAF world indoor championships.

All ready for a nice few days volunteering, and then in came the snow courtesy of "Emma" otherwise known as the "Beast from the East" with its cold Siberian temperatures and snowfall leaving most of the UK completely blanketed in the white stuff, and as usual the UK services being completely unable to cope in all sorts of areas including transport.

My journey started on Thursday morning with a 7.40am Megabus from Southampton to Birmingham (my pride at getting a £5 fare there and a £1 fare back on Sunday was immense - That'll be the accountant in me then)
The snow started late Wednesday evening, and by morning it was laying with no sign of disappearing.

The journey North through whitened landscape took around 4 hours, and once off the bus I headed to the Arena, to meet up with another volunteer (Karen) and find out about collecting my accreditation and then uniform for the championships.
Once that was sorted, I had some lunch and then headed to find my hotel, where I changed into my nice new uniform and headed back to the arena for my first shift.

After a short briefing, Karen and I were located at a backstage area, near Press entrance, athlete post event exit and the "Clean athletics" testing areas. Quite a busy place to be, and you needed to be on the ball as people were able to come at you from 5 different areas and my job was to make sure that they were actually meant/allowed to be there.

We had a lot of head-scratching when we realised that athlete accreditation included numbers for areas 8 and 9 and all the areas we had around us were 2,3,5, so once they left the track and had been through the media and kit collection areas, technically we couldn't allow them to go anywhere, except back up the stairs into the public areas. Not ideal for athletes who are "in the competition zone".
This we pointed out to some of the management team who scuttled off to make some adjustments.
Sometimes things look fine on paper, but it isn't until you start working with a system that you realise that a few tweaks need to be made. This happened a few times, but we managed to get it all working nice and smoothly after a while, and we started to recognise faces, plus could use our common sense in a few situations.

Being backstage is brilliant, though most of the time you tend not to see the competition, you can

hear it all going on, and get the sense of excitement in the arena itself. Sadly with the weather getting even worse, people were finding it hard to travel so while the athletes were local and catered for with transport, many volunteers didn't make shifts due to lack of trains etc. Most of our volunteer shifts were running with no team leaders and almost half the numbers we were needing. But as with every challenge we did our best and managed. Many adding extra shifts to cover for those who couldn't make it in.

With snow spikes attached to the walking boots to get me to and from shift. The thermal long johns and base layers (almost as much as trekking in Nepal) helped keep me warm during shift and I kept moving around and dancing to the music being played in the Arena. I think it kept many of the photographers, security staff and even athletes and kit carrying volunteers amused as they came through the area. In fact one of the security guys who works on that point at the Arena regularly, Leon, gave me a book he had been given by Craig Revel-Hallwood after the latest Strictly tour. Leon called me the dancing queen and thought I'd appreciate the book. What a lovely guy.

All shifts blend together after a while, and being moved to a different location initially on shift 3 put me at the access to the Arena where the TV presenters had to come through, so I had to check Colin Jackson, Michael Johnson, Gabby Logan and Denise Lewis through. Backstage gets pretty busy with loads going on all through the day, even during competition time, so there is always a need to be on the lookout, and we had a few police officers came through trying to check out whether we were enforcing security properly. We did get to know who they were after a while so tended to make sure they got extra checks, but to have done that with everyone who passed by us would have caused major hold ups. Even so we managed to stop people who didn't have the correct accreditation and had a lot of frustrated team managers we had to send off in different directions, which again we mentioned back to the management team and they reviewed their access controls again.

As with every volunteer role there are issues, some are bigger than others, and some people make more of them than others, but it is always nice to be appreciated for what we do. Sometimes we do wonder whether those that organise the events have ever actually worked at the lower end of the system to see exactly how things work in practice as opposed to in theory, but they did have a lot on their hands with coping with the weather and a large number of no show volunteers who just couldn't get to shift, even volunteers who had to step up and take on team leader roles were struggling to find people to cover some duties.

I was lucky to be sited inside the Arena (even if cold) unlike many of the spectator services team who were outside in all weathers directing people. Some as far as the Main train station, negotiating the building works going on in the centre and outside in all the blizzards. Kudos to them for sticking at it, and for their team leaders bringing them in to warm up on a regular basis. Hopefully when we get asked to feedback to them about our experience they'll be able to take some of the comments on board.

Meanwhile time to prepare for the next one. I suspect the Gold Coast will be a lot warmer and have some very different challenges.