Over 900,000 people apply for Guangzhou 2010 volunteers
Guangzhou, July 30 - Over 900,000 people had applied for volunteers for the Guangzhou 2010 Asian Games and Asian Para Games by midnight [ˈmidnait] July 29, said Wang Huanqing, Director of the Volunteers Department of the Guangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee .
GAGOC holds a press conference on Friday .
Mr Wang told the media at a press conference on Friday that the recruitment of Games-time Volunteers would end at 12:00am August 1 while the recruitment of City Volunteers will go on till September 30.
The Guangzhou 2010 Asian Games and Asian Para Games need a total of approximately 590,000 volunteers, including 85,000 Games-time Volunteers and about 500,000 City Volunteers.
Among all the applicants, 86.2 per cent are residents of Guangzhou and nearly 70 per cent are students and staff of higher education institutions.
Selected applicants will be officially registered as volunteers for the Games before the end of October.
Guangzhou will celebrate [ˈselibreit] the 100-day countdown [ˈkaʊntˌdaʊn] to the 16th Asian Games on August 4, Wednesday.
The introduction of Asian games.
The Asian Games were first held under the auspices of the International Amateur Athletic Federation and are now regulated by the Olympic Council of Asia.The first Asian games were held in 1951. Athletes came from Afghanistan [æfˈgænɪˌstæn], Burma , Ceylon [siˈlɔn] , India, Indonesia [ˌindəuˈni:zjə], Iran, Japan, Nepal [nəˈpɔ:l, -ˈpɑ:l, -ˈpæl, neɪ-], the Philippines, Siam , and Singapore. Six events were featured:
track and field, basketball, cycling, football, swimming, and weight lifting. The fact that the games included no traditional Asian sports indicates how “western” international sport culture had become by the postwar [ˈpəʊstˈwɔ:] period.
