Curling More Vulnerable Than Most Sports

Gambling on sport has been around just about as long as sport itself. As online sport gambling becomes increasingly legalized, the volume of sport gambling activity is massively increasing.

Gambling entities are moving ever closer to sport governing bodies, media organizations that broadcast sport, sports events, and athletes themselves. Why? These entities seek to stake out their own sports association turf in the minds of the betting public, and in so doing, promote more gambling activity on their platforms.

Unless this increased direct influence of gambling is extremely well policed and managed by the sports themselves, I believe that this incoming tsunami of betting activity represents an existential threat to sport integrity.

Curling is no exception. I believe that curling is more vulnerable than most sports to the spectre of bribery and match-fixing.

As a smaller sport, curling has always had to work hard to attract money and attention necessary to support and grow it. Most governing bodies and organizers are passionate volunteers.

At the international level, inclusion in the Olympics has driven the international growth of curling. It has also created an operational dependency on Olympic broadcast revenues shared with international sport federations. Historically, national, provincial and local curling event sponsorships from alcohol, tobacco, retail and other commercial entities has been commonplace. This support is also really hard to attract.

So when gambling organizations come along and say to a smaller sport like curling “hey, we’d like to give you money and sponsor your events and players” it is perfectly natural and understandable for that sport to say “it’s legal, so what’s the harm? No one else is stepping up to give us money, and we need it for the good of the sport.”

The main difference in gambling influence versus other commercial influences is this. Gambling influence directly threatens the integrity of the results on the ice, unlike any other commercial influence.

Match fixing related to gambling has been a stain on the integrity of sport for eons. Almost every sport has been affected by match-fixing in one way or another.

There are some common denominators for sports that are more vulnerable to match fixing than others:

• The sport result can be influenced if you can get to a single player or a very small number of players

• The sport does not have an independent, well-resourced and effective policing and monitoring mechanism to proactively monitor suspected match-fixing

• The athletes in the sport are not well paid, and could therefore be influenced by a bribe to fix a result.

Curling meets all three of these tests.

It is rarely the high-profile events where the fix goes in. It is usually an average game in an average event. Proposition betting raises the fixing risk even higher. An example of a “prop bet” might be “which team will score a three or more first?” It could be tempting for a player to think “I could pooch a couple early and give up a three, but we can still come back and win” and think that was somehow justifiable.

Codes of conduct that say that the players and officials can’t bet themselves doesn’t cover the actual integrity threat. The actual threat is somebody else making the bet, then bribing a player or official to influence the result they are betting on.

Curling people are generally high-integrity people. The “Spirit of Curling” still lives in the fabric of the game. But curlers are also people with bills to pay, people to feed, and human weaknesses and frailties. Criminals look for these vulnerabilities and target their victims carefully. As more betting activity comes into curling over time, it will become ever more interesting to match-fixers.

I accept that legal sport betting is here to stay, and that it will have an interest in betting on curling and giving curling sponsorship money. There are some things that I would like to see happen to try and minimize the potential harm associated with an influx of gambling activity in the sport.

Investment in gambling sport integrity monitoring. Ideally, a portion of any financial sponsorship made by a gambling organization should be invested in monitoring potential illegal gambling behaviour and educating athletes and officials about the threats and consequences related to illegal match-fixing and bribery. I would like to see guidelines to this effect developed by governing bodies. The challenge here might be that the governing bodies themselves are cash-strapped and wouldn’t support this use of money.

To the maximum extent possible, work with gambling entities to reduce the number of “prop bet” types that would be the most susceptible to fixing by an individual player. Curling people would have the most expertise about how a particular game situation could be manipulated or influenced by a bribed player. This would potentially be against the gambling entities commercial interests, so it would be an interesting test of a gambling partner’s true interest in sport integrity.

Develop and publish measures and sanctions specifically relating to the investigation and punishment of illegal match-fixing behaviour. We did it for illegal fabric on a brush, we can do the same for taking a bribe. Nobody in the sport should be in any doubt whatsoever about what would happen to them if they were caught illegally taking a bribe and fixing a game.

I’m old enough to remember calcuttas at cashspiels.

I’ve also worked in a sport (baseball) where the all-time hit leader was banned from the sport for betting on it. I know how hard it is for curling to get money from any source to run the sport, organise events and reward players for performing well. But I do worry about the overall integrity of our sport. We can’t take gambling money blindly and just trust that things will be okay. We need to invest in some safety measures.

Unless we do that, my fear is that 10 years from now, curling could regret a close association with gambling. Sports have been drummed out of the Olympic program due in part to corruption.

I do think that curling can take some sensible measures to mitigate that risk of corruption and build a healthy relationship with the gaming industry.

The time start taking those measures is now.