Abstract

Last July 2003 Barcelona held the tenth Swimming World Championship, organized by the International Swimming Federation (FINA), which had an unprecedented success – 2.015 swimmers coming from 157 different countries- and where fourteen world records in those five swimming styles of the competition were broken. This sport event, the greatest for the city of Barcelona since the 1992 Olympic Games, had the assistance of 1.300 volunteers coming from Catalunya and the rest of the Spanish State. Both the 4.500 subscriptions from those interested in taking part as volunteers in the Championships and the relevant and different tasks carried out by the selected ones, made this event become an ideal setting to analyse the volunteers profile of those taking part in sport events, taking into account five items (age, sex, origin, education and profession). Regarding age, it was here where we found more differences between the volunteers in the World Championship (both in applicants and selected ones) and the Catalonian volunteers.