Olympic Etiquette

Changping Vocational School in the suburbs of Beijing is an ideal place for many pretty women. It is the training base of the Beijing Olympic etiquette volunteers, and its graduates hope to become Miss Olympic Etiquette, serving at Olympic awards ceremonies.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) began selecting volunteers to serve at Olympic awards ceremonies from schools around Beijing last June. The selection process followed the principle of "pick the best from the better."

Candidates should be 1.65-1.78 meters in height, have regular features and a good figure and their physical conditions should conform to the position's requirements. More than 1,400 women have already taken the 20-day intensive training course, but only 380 will be on the final list and serve at the awards ceremonies. Fortunately, the women who fail this will still have a lot of possibilities to serve in other Olympic ceremonies.

"It is definitely our dream to face our idols," said candidate Hao Jingyu. Her idol is world-record hurdler Liu Xiang. "As long as I can get the qualifications to be on the final list, all the hard work will be worthwhile," she added.

The women revealed that before the intense training the teacher told them jokingly, "Only after you are trained as heroines can you get the qualifications to serve at the Olympic awards ceremonies."

The closed intense training, which lasts for almost three weeks, includes figure training, etiquette training, awards ceremony practice drills, Olympic and cultural knowledge study, as well as communication skills. Every day, the women must get up at 5 a.m. and go to bed at 10 p.m. "Every action in the awards ceremonies must be practiced repeatedly for hundreds even thousands of times," said Hao.

"I am very graceful now and through the training my overall temperament has changed a lot," she said. "The teacher said we must be careful of every detail. Specifically, we have very strict standards for every detail of standing, walking and even smiling."

Even standing has to be mastered as a technical and physical skill. In order to keep better balance of the body and make the figure straighter, the trainees must wear shoes with 5- or 6-cm heels; slightly hold down the chin, and have a thick book on their head and a piece of regular A4 copy paper between their legs. The candidates must stand for at least one hour with their head kept steady and the paper in place.

In the training, instead of medals and cups, there are two bottles of purified water and a book on the tray, with a total weight of 1.5 kg. "This is for improving the strength of the arm. The weight of the Olympic trays is about 1 kg, but those for the collective events are much heavier," said Hao.

Training for awards ceremonies is a tough task. "The training for the volunteers serving at awards ceremonies is largely the same as the training of a stewardess, the only difference is that the former serves a single person while the latter serves a group," said Yuan Chunyan, a teacher of aviation services at Changping Vocational School. Yuan said that the most important part of the training is to control pace. Miss Etiquette should maintain a steady pace length of about 30 or 40 cm.

"At the moment medals are awarded, the volunteers should turn spontaneously," Yuan said. When awarding flowers to the winners, the volunteers should bow to 15 to 30 degrees with the hip joint as the axle. "Since there are several volunteers in the same group when awarding the flowers, it is not easy to make them take concerted action, so the women will be trained to have the same rhythm in their minds."

The women must undertake special training for particular awards ceremonies. For example, for the boat racing awards ceremony, which will be held in the Olympic Water Park, the women must practice balance, as they will be standing on a floating platform.

Every Olympic volunteer adheres to the slogan, "Volunteer's Smile, Beijing's Image." "Smiling without showing teeth" was once a requirement of beauties in ancient China, but now it seems too conservative and does not conform to the modern appreciation of beauty. Therefore the women are trained to smile showing their teeth, and the number of teeth showed should be six to eight.

"At first, it was not easy to control how big the smile should be, so we just practiced with a chopstick, as the teachers taught us. We bit the chopsticks and looked in the mirror to practice," said Zhang Lusi, a volunteer from Beijing Changping Vocational School, majoring in aviation service. The 1.72-meter-tall and always smiling volunteer thinks that smiling itself is not the purpose. "Smiles should come from the bottom of the heart, only in this way can we make the smile effective to others," she said. Many of her classmates said they would show sincere smiles to the whole world, and make everyone feel the warmth brought by Chinese-style smiles.

Zhang and other graduates from the training class have already participated in the service of the "Lucky Beijing" Olympic test sports events. "These drills provided us with experience of dealing with emergencies," said Zhang. On one occasion Zhang broke a heel during an awards ceremony. "On this occasion, I calmed down at first, pretended that the heel was not broken at all, and tried to walk on tiptoe instead," said Zhang.

Liu Changwen is a volunteer who served at the awards ceremony of Lucky Beijing hockey ball competition. She said that there were 18 gold medals and a cup on the tray she had to hold weighing around 10 kg. "At the beginning, my hand holding the tray couldn't help trembling and I was quite afraid that the medals might drop on the ground, but at last I held on," she said. After the ceremony a member from the Australian team who won the championship gave flowers to Liu. "I was very excited at that time. I thought it was the best evaluation for the whole etiquette team of Beijing," she said.

Now the selection of Miss Olympic Etiquette is drawing to a close, and the final list will soon come out.

Although BOCOG does not select Miss Olympics purely on her appearance, according to the selection standards there are some "directive standards" for the chest, waist and seat measurements of the candidates. "This is for making the dress for the awards ceremonies, we must make sure that every woman can suit the dress properly," said Zhao.

Etiquette training specifically designed for the Olympics will start in March or April for the final selected candidates, who are not only good at oral English, but can speak basic Japanese, French, German and other foreign languages.