The 37th America's Cup is finalizing preparations for the competition, with the start of the regattas just around the corner. The urban transformations accelerated by the event are advancing at cruising speed; the city has already closed the cultural program with which it will accompany the regatta, and the teams have begun to unveil the boats with which they will fly over the waters of Barcelona. Another protagonist team maintains the same rhythm: Team B. The body of volunteers who will contribute to the development of the competition continues to be articulated with the forecast of closing its members by the end of May, as the head of the America's Cup volunteer program, Xavier Prat, explained to The New Barcelona Post.
The concretization of the volunteers who will make up the 2,300-member team that will collaborate in the regatta will come after nearly 1,600 have participated in training and team building sessions, held in March and during this weekend. With the Antigua Fábrica Estrella Damm as a setting, the sessions have brought the competition and its functions closer to future volunteers through general training sessions and activities aimed at fostering the team spirit of Team B.
Closing this team will involve a limited selection process. And it is that, despite being the edition of the America's Cup that will have the most volunteers, registrations have far exceeded the places offered by America's Cup Event (ACE), which continues to swell a waiting list that amounts to about 500 people. These are in addition to the more than 3,000 applications received by the organization when it opened the admission process for the volunteer program from June to December, above this required figure of 2,300 people.
The last edition of the regatta, in 2021 in Auckland, New Zealand, had 800 volunteers, almost a third of the 2,300 that will be in the Catalan capital"Volunteers expect active participation," so the organization carries out a search for interesting positions in four areas: land, water, television and media. The land area, which will include organizational support tasks and reception and attention to attendees in the race village and the fan zones, is the one that will require the largest team of volunteers: 1,800 of the 2,300 will be focused on these functions. The highly sought-after water area, with functions that involve navigating, will have 120, the same number as there will be in television and also in the media center.
The organization will assign each of the volunteers a role within one of these four areas, based on the interests and preferences of those selected. "We don't want to assign any position or any shift to someone who hasn't asked for it," Prat emphasizes. This is one of the criteria that govern the selection process, also marked by the purpose of prioritizing local participants, who will make up 80% of the volunteer team. The remaining 450 spots will be assigned to America's Cup loyalists from an international scope, who aspire to travel to the Catalan capital from as far away as New Zealand, to accompany the defending team of the trophy.
Those registered from third countries, however, far exceed this figure of 450 people: more than 2,000 aspire to be part of the Team B coming from other countries. Although many will have to stay out of the volunteer corps, Prat assures that the 12 teams participating in the regatta will be represented.
"Those registered from the international sphere are fans of the America's Cup. Local registrants may be, but they are usually more fans of Barcelona, of volunteering or of events of this type," highlights the program manager. Prat and his team face the selection of more than 1,800 local volunteers with a basic objective: "We seek maximum diversity" and that profiles of all kinds are represented, such as young people and residents of Barceloneta. Among the locals, there are "key" groups such as precisely the Barceloneta Neighborhood Association, the Catalan Sailing Federation and, as it could not be otherwise, Voluntaris 2000, born from the volunteer movement of the 1992 Olympic Games.
And it is that the Olympics marked "a before and after" also in the field of volunteering linked to events of this type. "Without the experience of the Olympic Games, the context would be very different culturally," Prat defends. Drawing and looking to the Olympic past, his team sets a double objective: that those who lived the Olympics relive that Barcelona of 1992 and, on the other hand, create a new precedent for those who are too young to have lived and remembered it, like Prat himself.
From supporting the marshall to backing television crews
After the training and team building sessions that ended this weekend, volunteers will be assigned to their respective positions and will receive general and specific training, depending on their functions. These will include support tasks that will not place responsibility on the volunteers. In addition, the positions have been conceived not only based on the needs of the competition, but also with the desire to find "interesting tasks" for those registered.
Thus, functions can range from helping with directions to spectator boats aboard the marshall's launch to providing support at team bases, as well as disseminating advances in sustainability linked to green hydrogen, accompanying television crews in both interviews and filming at sea, and editing tasks in the media center, among many others. All these positions will make up the largest volunteer team in the history of the regatta, which in its last edition, in 2021 in Auckland, New Zealand, had 800, almost a third of the 2,300 that will be in the Catalan capital.
Volunteers will perform functions in four areas: land, water, television, and mediaAll of them will work for several days within an extensive competition that will span 68 days. "Everyone will work with a common goal even if many do not see the final result," Prat illustrated. In fact, the activities of team building that have been posed to volunteers during the sessions have precisely followed this line. The construction of collective structures with recycled material so that a marble can travel its entire length, and the painting of fragments of large canvases convey to the volunteers the idea of to work on a shared project without necessarily witnessing its culmination. As a surprise element, the participants of the conference have taken with them one of the framed canvas fragments, just as they will take the memory and experience of participating in the development of the regatta.
The budget for all of this? It is not specified, as Prat prefers to view volunteering as "a great investment." And not only for the support it can offer to the competition, but also for the experience it represents for the participants, to maximize the event's connection with the city, and for the image it projects of Barcelona, according to Prat: "We want to show the world what Barcelona is and its culture of volunteering."