Olympic Ambassadors
Iowa Olympic Ambassadors Project takes UI student volunteers to Beijing 2008 games
by Lini Ge
The three young men opened the door of the conference room, immediately surrounded by a flock of reporters, dazzled by flashes of cameras and showered with questions from journalists from the most prestigious media in China: “Where are you from?” “How were you chosen?” “What do you think of Beijing?”
Not until that shocking moment did the three men – students from the University of Iowa – realize that they were the first international volunteers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“I know it may have been my 15 minutes of fame, but I didn’t feel I deserved it in any way because I wasn’t doing anything great,” said Marcus Schulz, a junior journalism and international studies major in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “I also thought it took attention away from the event and the other volunteers which were really important.”
Nathan Cooper, a junior journalism and American studies major in CLAS, described his experience of being a celebrity in China as “unbelievable.”
“I couldn’t believe they turned three American boys into a week-long fascination,” Cooper said.
The encounter was by no means the only unbelievable experience for Schulz, Cooper and Michael Stout, a junior business administration, journalism and English major in the Tippie College of Business and CLAS, who traveled to Beijing for 12 days this August to volunteer for the Junior World Wrestling Championships, one of a dozen of the Olympic test events.
Thanks to a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the UI and a partner school in Beijing, Tsinghua University, the three young men and about 20 other UI undergraduate students will have the opportunity to work as media volunteers at the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. The UI was the first university outside of China to sign such an agreement.
The two institutions reached an agreement with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) for training about 20 UI students to work as media volunteers at the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.
Under the agreement signed by the two universities and BOCOG, the UI students will play behind-the-scenes roles at the 2008 Olympic Games in August, and some will stay on as volunteers for the Paralympics in September.
The students will serve as reporters and writers on the front lines of the Olympic News Service, which provides continual coverage of all events for use by the international media, with English as the primary language. French will be the second official language and Chinese the third.
The students, most majoring in journalism, international studies and/or health and sport studies, have been preparing for the Beijing experience for the past year or more through their studies and extra-curricular work, according to Judy Polumbaum, professor in the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication in CLAS and initiator and facilitator of the Iowa Olympic Ambassadors Project.
The entire group of Iowa student volunteers is due in Beijing in late June 2008 to begin orientation and training. Most will stay through the regular Summer Games, Aug. 8 to 24, and up to a third may continue at the Paralympics, Sept. 6 to 17.
Cooper, Schulz and Stout – the three pioneers of The Iowa Olympic Ambassadors Project – were the first of two teams of students to take part in test events before the actual Games. The men were faced with surprises almost every day during their time in Beijing.
Right after they got into a car with the Chinese volunteers who picked them up at the airport, the men said they were amazed by the traffic in Beijing.
“The driving exemplified how different Beijing was,” Schulz said. “Cars were driving on the lines, getting inches from each other going probably 60 mph. And I never saw traffic cops.”
Stout, who had never been out of the Midwest before his Beijing trip, experienced a “huge cultural shock.”
“Everything was very, very different,” he said.
Even though Stout bought a computer program to help translate some basic expressions, he still found it extremely difficult to communicate in Chinese when asking for directions or ordering food.
For Cooper, the biggest challenge was not drinking milk once in nearly two weeks, since the only similar thing provided to him was warm soymilk for breakfast.
“I haven’t gone more than two days without milk at home,” he said.
All the hardships that the three men went through had been foreseen by Polumbaum.
“You can’t go with an exact plan,” she said. “They have to be prepared for how unpredictable China is. They have to be flexible.”
Cooper, Schulz and Stout were indeed quite flexible. Despite all the challenges, they were soon enthusiastically involved in training the second day after arriving in Beijing. During the two-day training, they went over the wrestling rules and gave Chinese volunteers who were unfamiliar with the rules a better understanding of the sport.
They started working the first day of the wrestling event. As “flash quote reporters,” the students got quotes from the athletes as soon as they finished matches, then rushed back and put them up on a database, which was accessible for other journalists who did not have a chance to interview the athletes.
Interviewing the athletes could have been easy, according to Schulz. “But I made it difficult by trying to come up with the best questions,” he said. “I also tried to change the questions between the morning and evening matches and come up with new questions each time I talked to a wrestler.”
Another difficulty of the job was caused by poor translation. Sometimes when Schulz worked with translators, he noticed that even when the athlete won a gold medal and obviously talked for a long time, the quotes from Russian to Chinese and then to English would end up with “I am happy.”
“I really didn’t know what they had said, but most gold medalists don’t simply say ‘I am happy,’” Schulz said.
Schulz said the three of them worked eight or nine hours a day at the venue, such a busy schedule that they were not able to see much of Beijing. Most of the time after work, they stayed in their dorms at Tsinghua University. The men agreed that the dorms with bathroom, TV and phone were quite accommodating.
For the two young women who spent 10 days in Beijing in October helping cover a tennis tournament as the second advance team of the Project, there were a few cultural surprises as well.
Elizabeth Tuttle, a junior journalism and international studies major in CLAS, and Emily Doolittle, a junior international studies major in CLAS, also stayed at Tsinghua University. But instead of having everything arranged for them as was the experience of the three men, they had to figure out a lot of things on their own.
“We made peanut butter sandwiches because it was the only thing that we knew what it was at the local store,” Tuttle said.
But the 10-day experience was still rewarding.
“I wouldn’t trade my experience in Beijing for anything. I didn’t know what to expect. Now that I’ve gone, however, I have a much better idea of what to expect in 2008,” Doolittle said. “I hope to interview more athletes, learn even more about tennis and explore Beijing and surrounding China more thoroughly.”
Schulz said he still gets excited when talking about the experience.
“For the first time I was able to look at the United States from the outside. I found out that everything I had learned was wrong or interpreted the wrong way without ever seeing China,” he said. “It made me wonder if I could ever really explain a place like that to someone who has never been there.”
Stout said he was “pretty flattered” when a Chinese student approached him in a coffee shop and asked him to be a pen pal.
“He was very interested in American culture, something I didn’t think I would find,” Stout said.
The five pioneers undoubtedly met Polumbaum’s expectations for all the students involved in the project – “to broaden their horizons.”
“For them, to know about China and make friends is more important than the event itself,” Polumbaum said. “And they will show the Chinese people what young, energetic and hard-working Americans can be like.”