The debate over a Beijing Olympic boycott boiled over in Italy, as a former Olympic champion and the country's member of the International Olympic Committee squared off at a sport management seminar in Milan last week.
Pietro Mennea, an Italian athletics star, knows all about boycotts. He competed at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow - and won the gold medal in the 200-metre event - the year of the great American boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Il Giorno newspaper reported that Mennea said he would not boycott the Beijing Olympics, but he wouldn't have awarded the Games to Beijing in the first place. An athlete boycott would work only if it included trading and diplomatic policies as well, he said.
Ottavio Cinquanta, an Italian IOC member who is also the president of the International Skating Union, agreed on one point, saying he was against boycotting “because it is useless.
“Besides, I would like to tell [French president Nikolas] Sarkozy: ‘Listen, if you do not come to Beijing, surely I will not cry, but in your opinion [would] the strongest exporter of French perfumes stop trading with China to boycott the Olympic Games?''
Specifically to Mennea, he said it would be better if the former world record holder shut up, because “one who says he would not award the Games to China is the one who won in Moscow.
“Mennea is an intelligent person, very successful also at university, but his declaration...is not worthy of a man who lived the sport,'' Cinquanta said, according to the newspaper.
Ironically, Mennea, who had received his doctorate in political science two weeks before the Moscow Games, had been a candidate for local office for the Social Democratic Party, which supported the Moscow boycott. But Mennea went to Moscow anyway, after 15 years of training and two previous Olympic attempts.
But why punish an athlete? Mennea says. “The athletes must go to China because they worked for years for this meeting and the choice of the site was not their fault,'' he said.
However, Cinquanta's rather personal comment about Mennea's worthiness appeared to unleash a flood of pent-up emotion from Mennea on the subject of Olympics and the worthiness of its officials. Mennea also once worked for the Italian political party headed by anti-corruption magistrate Antonio de Pietro.
Mennea retorted, saying Cinquanta had reduced his entire sports career to one Olympic Games (he competed at five Olympic Games and held the world record for the 200 metres for 17 years).
“It is obvious that this man does not know history,'' Mennea said, speaking of Cinquanta. “Not mine. And not even that of Tibet, which is worse.''
He accused Cinquanta of being one of the ones who voted to stage the Olympics in Beijing in the first place “when everyone knew that in that country, the human rights were not respected.''
And Mennea went further, attacking the IOC for being interested only in business and not sport or athletes. “The real problem is not even China,'' he said. It's the “caste” system of the IOC.
He said IOC members voted in 2001 for Beijing to stage the Games because, at the time, Juan Antonio Samaranch was retiring from his post as IOC president, and Jacques Rogge needed the support of the Asian countries to take his place. “And the Asian countries wanted the Games in Beijing,'' Mennea said. “Simple as that.''
“They go to China because China is powerful, as in 1936, they went to Berlin, to Hitler,'' he said. “In those days, Baron de Coubertin said that the Nazi Germany had reached the zenith of social progress. Fantastic, eh?''
