体坛英语新闻：IOC hopes Youth Games can overcome cost and apathy

SINGAPORE, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- IOC president Jacques Rogge said on Wednesday that IOC expects the Youth Olympics can overcome spiraling costs and the so-far subdued fan enthusiasm.

The Youth Olympics, which will be held in Singapore from August 14 to 26, features about 3,600 competitors aged 14 to 18 from 204 countries and regions. They are going to compete in the same 26 sports on the current Summer Olympics program.

"Very soon, the Youth Olympic Games will become as much an indispensable fixture of the Olympic calendar as its grown-up brothers," Rogge wrote in the days leading up to the inaugural event.

Cost estimates for the event have skyrocketed. The government said in July it expects a final bill of $287 million while initially estimate projected by IOC in 2007 was only $30 million.

Ticket sales for the Youth Games have been sluggish despite a $8.9 million government publicity campaign featuring large billboards around the city that encouraged neighborhoods to celebrate the Games.

In an online poll last month on Channel NewsAsia's website aimed at getting a gauge of public interest, 88 percent of 6,400 respondents voted, "I'm not interested at all," in the Games.

"Singaporeans should spontaneously be generating more excitement for the Games," Ang Swee Hoon, associate professor at the NUS Business School, said in a Straits Times editorial last month. "We should feel in our hearts a sense of awe that our country has been chosen."

Organizers are still confident of a successful games, expecting interest to pick up once competition starts. The football competition was to kick off on Thursday. The official opening ceremony will be on Saturday, with medals awarded in triathlon as early as Sunday morning.

"The IOC president took a great risk to organize these Games and bet on its future," IOC Olympic Games executive director Gilbert Felli told reporters earlier this week in Singapore. "The world is going to look at it and see if it works or not."

Rogge remains optimistic that the Youth Games will educate the next generation of athletes earlier and help discourage scourges such as doping and racism.

"I believe I can say we are experts in staging major sports events," Rogge said. "But we are entering now a new field, the education field. We might make some errors in the beginning, but we will learn from them."