Tunisia looks to festival to turn sporting fortunes

The small North African nation hosts the 14th Mediterranean Games from September 2-15, a quadrennial event gathering 3,500 athletes from a record 23 countries competing in 23 disciplines.
Tunisia has invested more than $180m in the games, a far cry from the $40m spent by the southern Italian city of Bari for the previous games in 1997.
“It’s normal that the investment we made is more significant because the image of our country is at stake,” Habib Ammar, chairman of the Mediterranean Games Organising Committee (MGOC), said.
A government official, who did not want to be named, added: “The image battle is one of our main goals in organising the games. We want the world to see our true reality, which is different from the one projected by a few dissident voices.”