Olympic Games: Betting corruption a concern for London 2012 organisers

Olympic Games: Betting corruption a concern for London 2012 organisers

At the high court, the high-profile trial of two alleged Pakistani spot-fixers continues amid staggering claims about the alleged scale of the problem. And before Wayne Rooney's petulant kick managed to knock it off the back pages, the arrest of his father over alleged betting irregularities dominated the news agenda.

If London's Olympic organisers ever hoped that the issue of betting corruption would not impact on their Games, events of the past two years have surely disabused them of that notion. Football has woken up to its problem of match-fixing on an industrial scale, cricket's traumas have been well documented since those fateful no-balls at Lord's and sports from tennis to snooker have been forced to grapple with the issues thrown up by a toxic combination of rapid technological change, globalisation, a huge illegal gambling sector estimated by Interpol to be worth £308bn in Asia alone, and the dark side of human nature.

There are two views on the extent to which all of this poses a danger to the Olympics. On one side are those who argue that there is not much money staked on Olympic sport and that, as such, legitimate bookmakers will spot dubious bets a mile off. There are those who say that the Olympics is too high-profile, too difficult to fix, too much of a risk.

Less often, you even still hear the naive view that the Olympic spirit will out and that athletes would not sully a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by cheating. It might be true of the vast majority, but the weight of evidence on doping down the years – not to mention the continuing stream of match-fixing headlines from other sports – suggests there will always be a corruptible minority.

The other, more compelling, view is that those seeking to influence sporting results will target anything from tiddlywinks to Greco-Roman wrestling if they feel there is money to be made. The threat is not so much from the British public placing wagers on Olympic sports (although it is interesting that William Hill will offer a market on every event next summer), but from the insidious threat from illegal, offshore betting markets.

And when it is possible to bet on just about anything broadcast live on television via illegal markets if you know how to, and given that the BBC has promised to air every hour of every sport, the clear and present danger is obvious. Add in the fact that many of those competing may be poorly remunerated, will hold out no hope of winning a medal and may be happy simply to be there, plus the fact that many Olympic sports fade into the background between Games, and the risk to Olympic ideals – and commerciality – is clear.

The IOC president Jacques Rogge has already claimed the threat is as great as the one posed by doping and launched a high-profile working group to try to tackle the issue on a global level. Just this week Tim Lamb, the former ECB chief executive who now heads up the umbrella organisation for all sports governing bodies in the UK, warned that the IOC had only woken up "late in the day" and said the threat is very real.

"My view is that there are a number of Olympic disciplines that are quite easy to fix. Somebody will finish third in a heat ostensibly to preserve their energy for the final," he warned at the annual conference of the Professional Players Federation.

"It's very, very important that all participants in the Olympics are aware of the dangers of this, it's very important that all the Olympics bodies are aware of this, it's very important that we continue to talk to the BOA. And it's also important that the expert working groups set up by the IOC contain the right people. My very strong view is that there is a danger of some of these IOC expert groups being full of high-profile people – politicians and ministers and so on – but what you actually need on those groups is practitioners."

That chimed with fears articulated by Chris Eaton, the no-nonsense Australian at the head of Fifa's head of security, who said that while the IOC's working group (which contains the sports minister Hugh Robertson among others) was a welcome initiative he feared there was a lack of representation from those with a real insight into the situation on the ground.

"If naivety is the biggest problem, pomposity is the next. You need to avoid pomposity, speak to people in the field and deal with the people who deal with the criminal, the player or the official every day," said Eaton. "This is not people in ivory towers. While I applaud the IOC's activity, the potential might well be they are too elevated in the stratosphere to see the reality."

On a micro level, the British government's moves to add the IOC and other global organisations to the list of bodies with which bookmakers are obliged to share information on irregular betting patterns is welcome. But there are doubts over whether parallel primary legislation that will bring offshore bookmakers under the aegis of the Gambling Commission, legally obliging them to share information if they want to offer bets in this country, will make it on to the statute book before the Games.

That move, first promised in the dying days of the Labour administration, remains caught up in wider arguments about the future of horse racing. Without also introducing the latter, the former will have little impact.

And no matter what is done to regulate the legal market, the wider problem of the huge illegal gambling industry remains. While Eaton, Interpol, sports bodies and local law enforcement agencies grapple with the problem on the ground, the longer-term solution must be a UN-led push for gambling markets to be regulated in those countries that are threatening to pull world sport out of shape.

But while the issue rose up the agenda last year amid the swirl of revelations surrounding the Pakistan cricket team and the realisation that football's problems were far deeper and more institutionalised than it feared, bold talk of forcing governments in Asia and the Far East to face up to the problem seems to have receded.

It took a public crisis in confidence and a series of high-profile Olympic cheats to ferment the political will to form a co-ordinated global push against doping. Those at the sharp end of the battle against corruption in gambling are desperately hoping it won't require the same headlines – potentially next summer – to do the same here.