For all their prestige and gravitas, the Olympic Games have lately proven to be a hotbed for scandals.
From a famous judging controversy in 2002 to bid bribery probes and even the resignation of a top Olympic official who was filmed offering to sell tickets for the 2012 London games on the black market, the modern Games have always felt vulnerable to bad actors. And while no major known Olympic betting controversy has ever bubbled to the surface, the massive rise of sports gambling in recent years—especially in the US, where the Supreme Court paved the way for states to legalize it in 2018 and prediction markets like Kalshi have also begun entering the space—makes this a natural concern as we head into the 2026 Winter Games in Milano Cortina.
Now that hundreds of millions of people can bet on events using nothing more than a mobile app, entities like the International Olympic Committee—the governing body for the Olympics—are taking extra precautions to avoid the kinds of gambling and fraud scandals that have rocked pro sports in recent years.
At least compared to the other sporting events with similar name recognition like the Super Bowl and the World Cup, the Olympics are a surprisingly small deal in the North American sports betting sector.
“Our [handle] on Kentucky Derby Friday-Saturday is more than the entire Olympics,” says Jeffrey Benson, sports operations manager for Circa, one of the world’s largest sportsbooks.
A few factors make the Olympics tougher to effectively bet on. The time difference between Italy and the US is one variable; events that occur while most Americans are sleeping naturally draw less betting attention. Many Olympic events also involve both preliminary rounds and medal rounds, which can create further logistical challenges for sportsbooks; they have to pull lines down after prelims and create all new ones for final rounds.
For many of the more niche sports, especially in the Winter Olympics, traditional sportsbooks just don’t consider it worth the legwork to set up an event so people can bet on it. Benson says Circa expects the 2026 Winter Games to account for less than 0.01 percent of its total bets taken for the calendar year.
Not every betting platform pays that little attention to the Olympics.
“A lot of these events are really what you make of them as a sportsbook and how willing you are to do the work and take the bets,” says Adam Bjorn, CEO of Plannatech, a global betting technology platform.
Bjorn says some betting platforms, particularly outside North America, take “decent volume” on the Olympics. Many of them set lines and take bets on every single event, no matter how obscure, even if doing so perhaps leaves them vulnerable to bettors who are extremely knowledgeable about certain niche sports. Bjorn suggests that some of these sportsbooks will even mark those anomalies as loss-leaders, helping attract new casual clientele who are drawn to the popularity of the Games.
Ice hockey is a headliner for the Winter Olympics within the sports betting world, no surprise given the presence of NHL players on the top national teams. Bjorn believes many of those non-US books will take more action on these games than they do on the average NHL game.
Even in smaller markets, entities like the IOC naturally care about betting integrity, especially given the Games’ scandal-filled recent history. The governing body has been actively involved in monitoring Olympic betting markets since the 2012 and 2014 Games via its OM Unit PMC (Olympic Movement Unit on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competitions), which it says utilizes its Integrity Betting Intelligence System, or IBIS.
That’s a lot of impressive acronyms, but what do groups like these actually do? And are they effective?
Watching the Detectives
For as long as legal sports gambling platforms have existed, people have tried to exploit them. That necessitates the presence of integrity agencies, which have existed in some form for decades.
These agencies, Bjorn says, grew into their modern form in the early-to-mid 2000s in large part as a response to widespread match-fixing scandals in professional tennis. These incidents led to the 2008 formation of the Tennis Integrity Unit, which Bjorn says was one of the first such groups to lean heavily on data-driven analysis to proactively spot malfeasance. By tracking live betting patterns across various sportsbooks and networks, the integrity agency could ostensibly spot suspicious bets that might signal collusion, match-fixing, or some similar attempt to scam the system.
Does some random second-round match at a small tournament suddenly draw 10 times the betting volume of similar matches, for instance? That might smell fishy to these agents, who could then coordinate with governing bodies to investigate.
More of these entities soon followed, including those that covered a multitude of sports.
“They saw niches to go to other leagues, sporting events or [government] regulators to say hey, we can monitor this,” Bjorn says. “We can start using big data.”
Integrity monitors are now ubiquitous in the regulated sports gambling market. IC360 (formerly US Integrity) is the most notable within the US, while the International Betting Integrity Association is a primary player globally as well as in part of the US. Bjorn’s company, Plannatech, works with these and other entities, using its full stack risk management platform to help analyze incoming bets in real time to detect anomalies.
These agencies obtain live betting data from betting platforms around the world and use it to monitor for potential signs of misbehavior—say, large bets coming in for an underdog within an hour of the game starting—and sending out alerts to sports leagues, federations, and casinos about the suspicious patterns.
“They actually have a dashboard that you can see where the bet flows are on certain sports,” Bjorn says. “They review stuff, partner with the leagues, monitor referees, umpires.”
In some cases, such patterns may only be discovered after the fact. In 2024, it was revealed that former NBA player Jontay Porter was involved in a betting scandal, and it was a suspicious pattern of betting and behavior that led to the detection of fraud. Porter claimed an injury or illness and pulled himself out of two games early in the first quarter. His conspirators were betting the “under” on how many points or rebounds he’d rack up, and Porter would guarantee those bets would hit by removing himself from the game.
The vast majority of the alerts flagged by integrity teams ultimately reveal no concerns. The 2 or 3 percent that do, though, can be valuable for weeding out potential scams.
The Olympics involve many of the same challenges for integrity agencies. The IOC partners with the IBIA for integrity monitoring, and it says it brings in a Joint Integrity Unit that includes Interpol, UNODC, and other worldwide regulatory authorities for each Games. The IOC also has a number of strict rules, including that no person accredited for the Games is allowed to place any bet on any Olympic event. The Committee also utilizes several forms of pre-event risk modeling where it tracks many of the Olympic sports in non-Olympic and qualifying settings to widen the baseline of betting and outcome trends.
The frequency of judged events at the Olympics, where humans are handing out scores that determine the winners and losers, presents an additional challenge. Compromising judges is one of the oldest tricks in the sports wagering exploitation book, and one of the most direct ways to guarantee illicit profits.
While he isn’t sure of specific details (his company doesn’t work on this area directly), Bjorn says he believes the IOC has proactively worked with data agencies to stem these risks. The integrity teams use granular athlete data to assess how each competitor performs in their event over time, then compares it with actual judging to spot potential anomalies.
(When contacted by WIRED, the IOC declined to provide specifics about its relationships with such agencies, but directed us to integrity resources that include mention of “scenario-based preparation” and “comprehensive risk assessments” that are shared with all stakeholders.)
Concern over compromised judges isn’t even an issue in certain locations; in Louisiana and Massachusetts, for example, betting on judged events is prohibited altogether.
It’s natural to assume an increase in sports gambling scandals over the past several years reveals a world where such activity is more prevalent than ever. But Bjorn celebrates new reports of suspicious bets or athletes being banned.
“The Jontay Porter thing, the Cleveland Guardians allegations, to me these are great things that they’re discovering,” he says. “Because this means that the integrity monitoring is actually working … It’s showing that some of these [scams] that existed for a very long time are actually getting found out now and caught.”
It’s tempting to think of the Olympics as something different, something more pure, that the rarity of the Games and their worldwide prestige make the average competitor less corruptible than other sports.
But thousands of athletes are competing in hundreds of events across a couple of weeks. It takes just one incident to break that illusion. One athlete who’s gotten themselves into money trouble and sees a way out, one greedy trainer looking to make a few extra bucks by leaking an athlete’s injury, even just one unintended slip of privileged information. If a cheating gambler is savvy enough, even the best integrity monitoring platforms might not matter.
“There are some dumb people out there who bet in certain manners and get themselves caught,” says Bjorn. “But there are a lot who are very sophisticated and place these kinds of wagers in ways that they will never get recognized and identified.”
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