体坛英语新闻：Italy's decision not to back Rome's Olympic bid won approval from experts

MILAN, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti's cabinet not backing Rome's planned bid for the 2020 Olympics was a right decision, an Italian Olympic champion and an economist told Xinhua in interviews on Wednesday.

According to the 1980 Olympic 100m gold medalist and longtime world 200m record-holder Pietro Mennea, such decision "prevented Italians from being stuck with an indefinite burden".

"Taxpayers and the country are not in the right economic conditions to host this huge event, and Monti made a very responsible, honest and correct choice", said Mennea, who is also the author of various books on the Olympics including the recent "I costi delle Olimpiadi (The costs of Olympics)" that was reportedly studied by Monti attentively before his announcement Tuesday.

Mennea noted that Italy's investment plan for the Olympics estimated around 10 billion euros (about 13 billion U.S. dollars), about the 0.7 percent of gross domestic product, would unavoidably mount in case of Rome hosting the games.

"Costs for London Olympics have quadruplicated, and the Beijing ones have more than doubled, while costs for Athens Olympics rose from three billion euros (about 3.9 billion U.S. dollars) to 15 billion euros (about 19 billion U.S. dollars), which triggered the country's debt crisis", he said.

"I participated in the Munich and Montreal Olympics in 1972 and 1976, and I know that both Germans and Canadians finished to pay off the games' burden only in 2005," Mennea stressed.

"I have been studying the Olympics phenomenon for decades, and can tell for sure that the world games have never helped any economy recover," he said.

In the athlete's experience, the Olympics public investments often end up to feed the businesses of private companies and lobbies, which has nothing to do with the original games' ideals and must be fought in order to get back the original values.

Rome not bidding for the Olympics was positive also for an economics and managements professor at Milan Bocconi university, Elio Borgonovi.

"Although the world games may have goods effects on the economy, in the Italian current situation the probability of gaining such vantage is inferior to risks the country would have both in economic terms and in the eyes of citizens, who have been asked to go through tough sacrifices," he said.

According to Borgonovi, who is also president of the Control commission for professional sports (Covisp) established by the Italian Olympic committee (Coni), in this moment in order to revive the Italian economy it is certainly more effective to invest in supporting the country's small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are the backbone of the national economy, as well as in public works such as infrastructures.

"Two factors have also played a role in Italy's decision not to bid for the Olympics: the wastes of projects left undone at the 2009 World Swimming Championships in Rome, and the Greek Olympics experience that has contributed substantially to the country's crisis," he noted.

The economist pointed out that Italy especially in the last 20 years has not been able to well manage this kind of very complex events, including the Milan Expo 2015, whose project has started in 2011 three years behind schedule due to political conflicts and personal interests.

"Abandoning the 2020 Olympic bid was certainly a hard decision, but Monti's cabinet has considered very attentively each aspect of it before making what I consider the right step," he said.