The dependence of major events on volunteer labour is well established. Vol-unteers are an essential component of the success of major events and, more-over, the scale and scope of the event volunteer workforce frequently makes volunteers the most visible element of events and the one with whom most participants and/or spectators interact. For example, the Sydney Olympic Games utilized approximately 47,000 volunteers (SOCOG, 2000) and a fur-ther 15,000 volunteers contributed their skills to Sydney’s Paralympic Games. Cashman (2006), however, reported that the total volunteer workforce for both events was over 70,000. Cuskelly et al. (2006) also indicated that the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games and the 2006 Doha Asian Games each utilized more than 15,000 volunteers and that even single-sport events, such as the 2007 Rugby World Cup (3000 volunteers) and the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup (3500 volunteers), require considerable numbers of volun-teers. Furthermore, there has been a trend of increasing involvement of volun-teers in events. This includes the operations of the Olympic Games, where there were around 28,000 volunteers at the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Summer Games compared with an estimated 60,000 at the 2004 Athens Olympics and 100,000 at Beijing in 2008, with the latter two including both Olympic and Paralympic Games volunteers (Karlis, 2003). While the Winter Olympics have fewer volunteers than their summer counterpart, they have also demonstrated a trend towards an increasing level of volunteer engage-ment (from just under 7000 at Lake Placid in 1980 to an estimated 20,000 in Turin in 2006).