Richmond Olympic Experience
Richmond Olympic Experience
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Olympic City: Richmond
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Country: Canada
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Edition of the Games: 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games
The Richmond Olympic Experience (ROX) is the first member of the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Museums Network to be located in North America.
The ROX was conceptualised to be part of the permanent infrastructure legacy of the City of Richmond’s participation in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. The City desired to have a first world museum that showcases the Olympic artefacts, history, experiences and tells the story of Olympism. The City worked alongside the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Olympic Museum based in Lausanne, the Olympic Capital, to create a unique Olympic experience that is engaging and imaginative for people of all ages and cultural backgrounds.
Under the impulse from the City, the ROX has been built in a modernised and innovative way. The focus was to create an atmosphere where the visitors would live an extraordinary experience. The visitors are really immersed in a new world that promotes sports and the Olympic Values.
The ROX offers a wide range of activities through high-tech sport simulators that give the opportunity to the visitors to be introduced to new sports and to take part in challenges to test themselves. They can then compare their results with the best athletes worldwide.
The ROX was created as part of Richmond’s overall legacy plan for the Olympic Games. It is located at the Richmond’s Olympic Oval, which is a sport venue where people can practice a wide range of sports and part of the legacy plan of the Games. The whole area and the community benefits hugely from this programme and are incited to practice more and be more involved in sports.
Event organisers such as city authorities, local sports clubs and societies and even private interests can obtain access once their event has been approved. They can then use the tool to recruit volunteers, searching and filtering based on their relevant criteria, and then to communicate with these volunteers when performing their initial outreach. When it comes to delivering the event in question, the software allows the event organiser to manage the volunteers between the various event sites and activities, tracking their hours and monitoring their assignments to optimise the event delivery.
Volunteers can access the programme to create a profile for themselves and submit their own relevant information as they see fit. Preferences such as the type and duration of event, the sport in question and seasonal availability are all centrally recorded and stored on the iCanHelp platform. The software maximises the probability that the individual is matched to the most suitable role based on their personal data and preferences.
The programme was initially introduced to develop a regulated and streamlined volunteer system for the City of Richmond as part of its contribution to the organisation of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The system has remained in place as part of the legacy for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Over 9,000 volunteers are registered on the database and this has contributed to the successful staging of numerous sporting events in the years since the Vancouver Games.