International Youth Work Action (ORA) – Great example from XIV Winter Olympic - Games in Sarajevo, 40 years ago!

This year marks the 40-year anniversary of the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games, a proud and fondly remembered moment in the city’s history. Sarajevo was the focal point of the world that winter, and hosting the biggest sports festival of the year was something that nobody could have anticipated at the time. To this day, it remains the most important sporting  event in the region’s history.

A significant number of sporting venues and buildings for accommodations were built especially for the Olympic Games, including the Zetra Olympic Hall, a huge multipurpose venue which is still used today, as well as ski jumping and bobsled venues. Upgrades were also made to existing stadiums and other sporting facilities. In fact, there were 167 major and 400 minor projects completed just before the opening of the winter Olympic games.(source) People were overjoyed that their small portion of the world would be hosting the Winter Olympics, and many came together as volunteers to help set up and host the event.

Seven years before the Olympics were set to start, young people from across the country convened every summer and worked for one month toward any and every project needed to set up the Olympic Winter Games in Sarajevo.

The ORA(Omladinska Radna Akcija) was a popular youth volunteer movement in the former Yugoslavia, where, in Sarajevo’s example, 17,499 young volunteers worked every summer for 7 years leading up to the games to build the ski jumping and other Olympic venues that would be opening in 1984.

According to Miroslav Pejic, a former coordinator for the ORA Olimpijada 84 (Youth Work Action Olimpijada 84), these volunteers were organized into 354 brigades from every part of the former Yugoslavia, including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro.

In addition to seven years of ORA Sarajevo, during the Olympic Games at the ORA "Olimpijada '84" (Youth Work Action Olimpijada 84),  hundreds of young workers from the hospitality and tourism industries from the former Yugoslavia volunteered, dedicated to offering the best services to the visitors who would be arriving in Sarajevo from all over the world.

According to Miroslav Pejic, 379 young hospitality professionals from across Yugoslavia came together including 160 accommodation and tourism workers who volunteered 100,000 hours toward hosting the Olympic games. These young professionals were considered the best in their fields. They were fluent in at least two languages, and were dispersed to offer hospitality services across the multitude of new venues. It was one of the most attended Olympics up until that time, with a record-breaking number of participants showing up as more than 2,500 people. (source)

The volunteers, also known as brigadiri, were organized into 8 groups assigned to different centres, including Skenderija, Zetra, and the Jahorina, Bjelasnica and Igman mountains, among others.

Work hours ranged from 10 – 12 hours a day, every day. Sometimes, if the occasion called for it, shifts were even longer. The variety of positions filled included cooks, waiters, receptionists, catering services, event and operations managers.

In addition to working at the sporting venues, these volunteers worked in the Olympic villages such as Dobrinja, which had about 2,100 units to host the athletes, their families, and the foreign press (source). Another prominent Olympic village was Mojmilo.

The legacy of the work that ORA volunteers did for the Olympic Games can still be felt to this day. The new development of infrastructure and sports services still benefits thousands of people in the city. In fact, Dobrinja is now a community where 40,000 people live.(source) Mojmilo has about 639 apartments which have today been repurposed as social housing for families in need. (source).

Today, six out of the eight constructed venues are still in use and of service to the local community and visitors. These venues significantly boosted the post-games winter sports activity in the region, and it was recorded that participation in winter sports was five times higher after 1984, specifically among children. (source) 

These venues which promote and facilitate sports activities contribute to the lasting winter sports culture that is now part of Sarajevo’s regional identity.

The Sarajevo Olympics are a great example how volunteers help to deliver a successful sporting event.