The Games run on labour that is not paid

Tens of thousands of volunteers make an Olympics function, and the accounting treats their work as though it were free.

Strip the volunteers out of a Summer Games and the thing stops in about ninety minutes. Nobody scans a ticket. Nobody tells a Finnish shooter which shuttle goes to the range. The mixed zone has no one to hold the rope, results printouts do not reach the press tribunes, and a hundred thousand spectators discover that a stadium is a maze.

Host committees recruit these people in the tens of thousands, interview them, train them, uniform them, and pay them in a jacket and a packed lunch.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is wrong. Volunteers are not being duped. Many have applied repeatedly, some travel across the country at their own expense, and the ones I have talked to over the years describe it as one of the best fortnights of their lives. Wanting to be inside the thing is a real motive and it does not need debunking.

The problem is what the arrangement does to the budget. When a bid estimates operating costs, the workforce line is small because the workforce is largely unpaid, and that small line makes the whole project look more affordable than it is. The labour has not disappeared. It has been moved off the balance sheet and onto people who can afford to take three weeks off work, cover their own accommodation in the most expensive fortnight in the city's history, and eat the cost.

That last clause is the real issue. Unpaid work is not equally available. It selects for retirees, students, and employees of large firms that grant leave, and it selects against anyone in hourly work with a family. So the friendly face of the Games, the one every broadcast montage lingers on, is drawn from a narrower slice of the host population than the city itself.

The fix is not to abolish volunteering. It is to pay travel and accommodation properly, to cost the workforce honestly in the bid, and to accept that a Games which cannot afford to house its own volunteers is a Games that has understated its budget.

Every host thanks them at the closing ceremony. Standing ovation, big screen, real warmth. Then the accounts are published and the largest workforce in the operation appears nowhere in them.