#11 - Royal Ten Race Review and Volunteering at the Olympics with Niki Koutrou

This episode is in two parts: the first is my conversation with fellow Leiden Atletiek runner, Tom de Heiden and the second part, is my interview with Dr Niki Koutrou of the University of Sunderland. She has done a heap of work on volunteering cultures around mega sporting events such as the Olympics and city-marathons. I interviewed her out of my realisation that our sport cannot happen without volunteers and I wanted to know more about the context of the Athens Olympics in 2004 and what volunteering meant in Athens. I’m also curious about legacies of Olympics, and what they leave behind or create; particularly because this is an Olympic year and also there is always so much hype for the Olympics and afterwards there can be a kind of massive ‘let down’, so to speak. 

 

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*Interview with Niki Koutrou starts approximately 25:10. 

Relevant Links:

Niki Koutrou, Staff profile

Koutrou and Kohe: Volunteering at the Olympics

Royal Ten

**Music by Cahaya Sofia playing a fragment of My Head, My Heart by Ava Max. 

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