IOC brings in no-betting rule for Beijing

[Qbins Missile Crisis]

Olympic officials will work with Interpol investigators this summer to track illegal betting rings around the Beijing Games under a new zero-tolerance approach to gambling and drugs in sport. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is deploying a special monitoring unit amid fears that the credibility of results could be compromised by betting scams.

China is a $100 billion-a-year (about £50 billion) market for illegal betting and sport is popular among speculators. Football and tennis, both of which are Olympic sports, attract the most money.

The IOC will use Early Warning System, a company set up last year by Fifa, football's world governing body, to work with its staff during the Games in August to monitor suspicious betting patterns. The agency, which investigates allegations of match-fixing in football, has signed up more than 200 bookmakers and betting companies worldwide.

All accredited personnel at the Games, including athletes, coaches and journalists, will be required to sign a form agreeing not to bet on any Olympic competitions or promote any betting companies. The new clause was introduced after the IOC heard from anti-corruption experts, including Sir Paul Condon, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who has investigated betting rings in international cricket.

Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, said: “We have agreements with bona fide betting companies and we will rely on them to advise us if there are any abnormal patterns in betting and if something is suspicious.”

Any athlete or sports official found guilty of breaching the no-betting rule will face an IOC disciplinary panel.

In January, Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol, said that the agency had arrested 430 people and shut down 272 gambling dens handling $650 million in bets in a crackdown on illegal football gambling in Asia. More raids are planned to stop the flow of money from gambling syndicates to people-trafficking, prostitution and extortion rackets.

An estimated $104 billion was bet by Chinese domestically and overseas in 2006, according to the China Centre for Lottery Studies at Peking University. The figure is ten times the sum spent on state-run lotteries.

The IOC's crackdown on illegal gambling was coupled with a tougher stance on drug cheats. Any athlete caught taking banned substances at the Beijing Olympics and banned for more than six months will be excluded from the next Games in London in 2012, under new rules that come into force on July 1.

From The Times
June 7, 2008
timesonline.co.uk