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IOL News
5 days ago
- Sport
- IOL News
Tennis is failing to address gambling-fueled abuse seriously
Last year's singles winner Barbora Krejčíková with the trophy. Women players particularly have received a staggering rise in the amount of online abuse they receive on social media, directly linked to their performance on court. At least 40% of the abuse is from punters betting on them. Adam Minter Wimbledon's stars will have to endure hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of threatening social media posts and direct messages when the tennis championship unfolds over the next two weeks. Racism, misogyny and straight up mean-spiritedness will comprise much of the abuse. If past tournaments are any guide, gamblers will volley many of them. According to a new report from the Women's Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation, 40% of the angry messages players received during the 2024 season came from disgruntled bettors. The missives are vile. For example, Katie Boulter, the second ranked British player, recently told the BBC that she's received messages instructing her to purchase 'candles and a coffin' for her family, and hoping that she gets cancer. On a human level, such harassment is horrifying. On a sporting level, it threatens the integrity of competition. To address the problem, the WTA and ITF are calling for more action against individual gamblers by gaming operators. It's a good idea, but it's not enough. If the tennis associations are serious about protecting players, they need to do a better job of policing and reforming the betting companies with whom they have established profitable partnerships. Tennis has always been popular with bettors due to its year-round schedule, frequent events and long matches. Online betting has made it more so. Instead of simply wagering on outcomes, online options provide gamblers with the ability to make real-time, in-play bets on propositions as varied as who will win a set, which player will break serve next and how many aces a player will make. Unfortunately, these individual-focused 'prop bets' increase the risk of targeted athlete harassment - and not just in tennis. In the US, for example, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has found the link between prop bets and athlete harassment to be so pervasive that it's called upon states to ban these sort of wagers on college sports entirely. Until recently, professional tennis has had little incentive to look at the link and determine how to address it. After all, prop bets are extremely profitable for the gambling sector and their partners in the tennis industry. Nobody pretends otherwise. When the ITF announced that sports marketing firm Infront Sports & Media AG will serve as its betting and data stream rights holder starting in 2025, the federation touted that the deal would provide it with 'significant financial uplift.' But in recent years, more and more players are complaining about online harassment from gamblers. As these complaints accumulate, they've put tennis and the gambling industry on the defensive. To get a handle on the scale of the problem, the ITF and WTA worked with data sciences firm Signify. As detailed in their report, Signify analyzed 1.6 million posts and comments sent to players who competed in the associations' events during the 2024 season. Roughly 8,000 were abusive and threatening. Fifteen were considered so serious that they were passed along to law enforcement, including four posts related to competition at Grand Slams and one regarding the Paris Olympics. That detected abuse is likely just the dirty tip of a much bigger iceberg that's hidden away in direct messages or in posts that don't directly tag players. Either way, the damage is widespread, causing anxiety and depression in athletes and those close to them since family members are often targeted, too. Ultimately, those mental health effects can make their way onto the court. What makes the situation worse is that most tennis players have little choice but to subject themselves to it. For example, the WTA has long encouraged athletes to post and self-promote - and then reserves for itself the right to use that content for the organization's own marketing purposes. If players don't post, they can still find success on the court. But their personal brands, and the associated paid promotional opportunities, won't be nearly as lucrative. The good news is that the tennis organizations are quantifying the problem and seeking to insulate players from it. Those who participate in WTA Tour and ITF World Tennis Tour events are now covered by Threat Matrix, a service that filters abuse from social media feeds and direct messages. That's a good start. But even if such a system could be 100% effective - and it can't be - it doesn't actually get at the root causes of the problem. Addressing those factors isn't simple. Legal gambling isn't going away, nor should it. Fans like it, and if they don't have legal options, some will simply seek out easily accessible alternatives. But that doesn't mean that tennis is helpless. Gambling companies need access to the sport's feeds and data to offer products to bettors. If the tennis industry doesn't like how those products are impacting its players, it has considerable leverage to demand changes. Among the most significant steps the sport could take is to demand a limit - or even ban - on many of the in-play prop bets that other sports have identified as a source of harassment. Likewise, associations could simply delay the near real-time streams of tennis matches they provide to betting companies so that in-play bets are more difficult. Either step would hurt online gambling and tennis revenue posing short- to medium-term financial challenges. But refusing to even consider them would mean the sport's governing bodies aren't meaningfully considering the well-being of their players - a stance that could damage their long-term interests even more. | Bloomberg

IOL News
04-06-2025
- Business
- IOL News
Pro-doping enhanced games are the Olympics' fault
Adam Minter Performance-enhancing drugs destroy the bodies, minds and reputations of athletes. Nonetheless, a group of investors, including Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., see a business opportunity. They recently announced the first edition of the Enhanced Games - a kind of doping Olympics in which athletes are allowed and even encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs - will be held in Las Vegas next May. It's a perverse concept, but that hasn't stopped four Olympians from already signing on. Other athletes will likely follow, lured by millions of dollars in prize money and appearance fees. The actual Olympics have nothing to do with this, but the world's most popular sporting event isn't blameless. Its business model, under which athletes are paid little - if anything - creates the opportunity for something as warped as a sporting event that encourages doping to emerge. Consider the dilemma faced by Kristian Gkolomeev, an accomplished 31-year-old swimmer who has competed in the last four Summer Olympics for Greece. By his own admission, it hasn't exactly been a financially lucrative existence. In 2016, for example, the Greek government supported some of its top Olympians with stipends of less than $1 000 a month. Then and now medal winners receive lucrative bonuses, but Gkolomeev - like most Olympians - has never won one. Enter the Enhanced Games. Last year, in hopes of drumming up interest in the event, organizers offered a $1 million bounty for breaking the men's 100-meter freestyle swim. Gkolomeev signed up, juiced himself, and sure enough, 'broke' - a term that should be used loosely when it involves steroid usage - the record in February. In late May, at the Enhanced Games announcement, he was unapologetic when he told reporters: 'A successful year at the Enhanced Games for me is more than I could make in 10 careers.' That's a sorry commentary on the current state of Olympic sports such as swimming. After all, it's not as if the International Olympic Committee is hurting. Lucrative media rights contracts and sponsorships allowed the organization to earn $7.6 billion between 2021 and 2024. What happens to that cash? The IOC says 90% of it is distributed to organizations throughout the Olympic movement, from National Olympic Committees to host cities. Unfortunately, most of that money doesn't reach competitors. Instead, it's devoted to things like training facilities, host city stadiums and executive salaries. According to a 2020 report by Global Athlete, an athlete welfare organization, between 2013 and 2016, only 4.1% of IOC and NOC funds went to contestants. The situation doesn't appear to have improved over the last decade. Last year, a congressionally mandated report found that around 26% of American participants in the Olympic and Paralympic pipelines earn less than $15 000 per year. Athletes in developing countries often have it worse. In Kenya, for example, some who trained for the 2024 Olympics received allowances of roughly $7.50 a day. Bonuses for winning medals can make up some financial ground. In Kenya, a 2024 gold medal was worth around $23 000; in the US, it earned $37 500. That's a nice check, but once an athlete spreads it out over four years (or more) and accounts for intensive, often full-time training, it's far less impressive. US Olympians, for example, report spending an average of $21 700 annually on just competition fees and memberships. That compensation and expense structure isn't an accident or oversight. The modern Olympic games were launched by a European aristocrat who expected athletes to compete for the joy of sport, not money. That sentiment has remained stubbornly intact even as the games have evolved into a multi-billion-dollar advertising platform for the world's biggest brands. Last year, for example, the IOC reacted furiously when World Athletics, the governing body for sports such as track and field, announced plans to pay $50 000 to gold medalists in its events. From the IOC's perspective, compensation only serves to widen the gaps between more and less privileged countries and competitors. It's a tone-deaf response that highlights how out of touch - and perhaps ambivalent - the Olympics are with the lived reality of the athletes who generate its revenue. The Enhanced Games are built to exploit the oversight. 'One of our core principles is we want to make our athletes as rich as possible,' explained Aron D'Souza, president of the sporting event, in a May interview with Men's Health. There will be ample opportunities to do that in Las Vegas. The Enhanced Games plan to host competitions in three categories: swimming, track and field, and weightlifting. Each event will feature a $500 000 purse, with the winner earning $250 000. In addition, everyone competing will receive an appearance fee and is eligible to win bonuses for 'breaking' world records (as Gkolomeev did). That's potentially a lot of money, though it's not likely to be enough for the world's top Olympians - those who might win Olympic gold. They'd be forfeiting their reputations and chances at sponsorship deals. But the Enhanced Games doesn't need that kind of competitor. After all, enhancement is all about taking someone who can't win a race or set a record and turning them into an athlete who can. There are many people who will never touch a medal podium who will be eligible for that role. For anyone who cares about the integrity of sports, this is a tragic outcome. And it won't be the last of its kind. As long as the Olympics and other elite sporting competitions remain tethered to outdated beliefs of compensation, there will be opportunities for exploitation. Over time, each instance will only serve to erode the public's confidence in the fairness of competition. | Bloomberg Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of 'Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."