International Olympic Committee (IOC) president,Jacques Rogge says the Olympic movement cannot be naive as far as the menace of illegal betting is concerned as it could raise its ugly head at the world's biggest sporting festival. "Illegal betting is a major challenge for sport,at the same level as doping. We should not be naive. It will happen some day and we've got to be prepared for it," Rogge said at a seminar organised at the Olympic Museum by the International Sports Press Association (AIPS) yesterday. Rogge said the IOC had been monitoring the problem of unfair play,including illegal betting,for a few years and was organising a conclave on March 1 with governments and sporting bodies to formulate a programme for tackling the menace that has begun affecting several sports. Inaugurating a seminar on illegal betting in sport,Rogge said "illegal and irregular betting should be taken as a major threat by all involved in sports. "We will call upon the support of governments the same way we did in 1998 to create the World Anti Doping Agency," said Rogge. "The sports world could not solve the problem alone. We have to work with governments,with the lotteries,with bonafide betting companies and everyone concerned with having clean sport." "In the Olympic movement,we have adapted our rules and regulations to give us the juridical power to sanction athletes coaches and everyone else if need be. There has never been a case of any suspicious betting in the Olympics but it has to happen some day and we will have to be prepared." "Illegal or irregular betting which should not be confused with the legal and regular betting offered by national lotteries and private entities that is a major source of financing to sport is potentially crippling. At its worst it can deter people from participating in sports in the first place," he said. Rogge said the IOC had tackled the issue since 2007 by adapting rules and regulations to sanction everybody if need be. He said they had established a network with the international federations. UEFA Communications chief,Alexandre Fourtoy said Europe's football governing body was also increasing the vigil in the fight against illegal betting,while World Lottery Association president,Risto Nieminen,insisted that the value of sport as entertainment could only be based on fair competition. "Cases of match-fixing are dramatic and terrible but the new threat which has come with the explosion of the financial value of sports and the development of information technology is organised crime with money laundering the most important goal," said Niemenen. "It could be that today is the easiest place to launder money. There are still some weak areas in the sports world. The structures such as clubs,associations and the international federations were not set up to function in a period where so much money is involved. The institutions have not reacted to this development," he said. "It is time for sport to say we do not allow this kind of betting,we do not want to have any corrupting influence. There must be a dialogue which involves everyone the media included," said Niemenen. Fourtoy told 170 delegates and journalists at the conference that UEFA was appointing a top prosecutor,Pierre Cornu,as its chief legal counsel for Integrity and Regulatory Affairs. UEFA now keeps an eye on nearly 30,000 matches a year in the top two divisions of 53 member countries and analyses a staggering 100 million bets. The UEFA disciplinary unit handed two life bans to match officials last year but Fourtoy said gathering evidence remained difficult as they tried to pin down unregulated betting. "We can regulate ticketing and accreditation but it is much more difficult to spot a guy on a mobile phone in a crowd of 20,000," he said. "Our biggest problem is to motivate the authorities. These crimes do not yet involve murders so they are not number one on the list,but for UEFA the fight against corruption is an absolute priority because we have a zero tolerance policy," he added. "If everyone believes sport is fixed,then I am out of a job and so are you," he told journalists attending the seminar at the Olympic Museum. Thomas Spoering,representing FIFA's Early Warning System monitoring body,said betting had changed over the past 15 years. "Live betting during matches had risen from 0 per cent to 60 per cent of the market," he said.
