No Borders

British volunteer Eloise Paterson (center) poses for a photo with members of the Coldstream Guards regiment, the oldest regiment in the British Army. Mike Groll / Associated Press

Volunteers watch a performance at break. Julie Jacobson / Associated press

Olympic volunteers find that the world is in their grasp, Li Xiang and Qiu Bo discover in London.

For Gemma Herens, a 23-year-old volunteer of the London Olympics, the Games is truly an international and borderless event.

Herens, who has just graduated from the University of London with a bachelor's degree in Chinese and economics, considers herself a Londoner because she was born and raised here.

But she comes from an international family - her mother is a Beijinger and her father is a French sports journalist with the BBC in London.

So when there are Chinese, French and British teams competing, the family will cheer for all the athletes.

"I'm mixed and the Olympic Games is also an event that gathers people from different countries with different racial and cultural backgrounds," she says.

The ability to speak English, Chinese and French fluently gave her an extra advantage during the volunteer selection process.

Her daily job is to help sponsors of the London Olympic Games arrange their activities in the Olympic park and receive guests invited by the sponsors to the Games.

But this is not Herens' first Olympic experience; she also volunteered at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. She still keeps the pin of the Beijing Games on her backpack, and can still recall the impressive opening ceremony in Beijing.

Herens says that the London opening ceremony was not as delicate and glamorous as the Beijing one, but it was more modest and more down-to-earth.

"It was like London Mayor Boris Johnson, who always has a cheerful spirit with his signature haircut," she says.

"The most rewarding thing of being an Olympic volunteer, among other things, is that young people can work together and celebrate the sports spirit no matter which country you come from or what degrees or backgrounds you have," she says.

Among the 70,000 volunteers are Chinese students in London who have actively participated in the event.