As the world prepares for the start of the winter Olympic Games on February 6 in Milan, an international coalition of groups concerned about the harms from sports betting is calling upon the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) to ban sports betting sponsorship and marketing.
The coalition, consisting of non-governmental organizations from Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia and Japan, has sent open letters to IOC and IPC this week expressing their concerns about the growing public health crisis fueled by what they describe as aggressive advertising of online gambling and predatory gambling practices.
“If you had told me three years ago that this is what I would be doing in retirement, I would have fallen over in surprise, but sport betting is poisoning sports and negatively affecting a growing number of young people, many well below the age of legal betting,” says Bruce Kidd, a former Olympian and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto.
Kidd, who chairs the Canadian signatory of the letters, the NGO called Ban Ads for Gambling, said that allowing gambling ads on Olympic programming is at odds with the IOC stand against match fixing and competition manipulation.
“That normalizes the harms of sports betting and completely contradicts the IOC’s messaging about the importance of health and physical activity,” Kidd said in a joint press release by the coalition.
“Sport betting is addictive, entirely passive and does not contribute to the realization of Olympic values.”
The coalition is urging the IOC to endorse the public health recommendations of its partner organization, the World Health Organization, which can be found at: Gambling.