A set of London 2012 Olympic Games pin badges belonging to Gavin Jones, Games Maker, Cardiff, 2012

Description

A set of London 2012 Olympic Games pin badges belonging to Gavin Jones from Grangetown, Cardiff. Gavin volunteered as a Games Maker at the London 2012 Olympic Games. He was interviewed as part of the VCS Cymru Chronicle Project and described his selection, training and experiences.

He explained that most of the pin badges were rewards, but he was given the British Airways one (centre) by a flight attendant:
"Now pin badges were the rage and it was… there is a selection there, so you've got all these, so you’ve got silver and bronze and gold pin badges. You got gold when you'd completed all of your shifts, but there were lots of others being given out. We were told not to be swapping pin badges but people did. People went mad; they put loads of pin badges on their lanyards. I got one because I took… that was the other thing we ended up doing a lot of, we took pictures of people especially someone, especially someone who was in a couple, only two of them. We wanted to make sure they got a picture with both of them in the shot so we started taking their cameras off people saying, not literally taking them off them but [laughing] asking “Do you want a picture taken?” I only, I only dropped one, it was someone’s phone. I thought “Oh no, that's it, I'm going to get into trouble.” But yeah it was great and we were taking loads of pictures, and there was a British Airways flight attendant, she was on her own and she was just taking a picture, so I said, “I'll do a picture of you with the stadium in the background”, and she said, “Oh, yeah brilliant!” and she gave me that one actually which was the… quite a rare one, a British Airways Olympic pin badge, But I didn't go into the whole swapping thing, I was quite happy with the ones we were given."

The Olympic website explains:
“London 2012 volunteers are called ‘Games Makers’, as they are helping to make the Games happen. The Games Maker recruitment process began in September 2010, with the London 2012 Organising Committee receiving more than 240,000 applications.
"Up to 70,000 people were chosen to become Games Makers and they will take on a wide variety of roles across the Olympic venues during the Games: from welcoming visitors to transporting athletes, helping out behind the scenes in the Technology team and making sure the results get displayed as quickly and accurately as possible."
(Source: www.olympic.org/news/volunteers-helping-to-make-the-games-happen, accessed 26/2/17.)

The private collection of Gavin Jones.
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