For all of them prestige and gravitas, the Olympic Games recently proved to be a hotbed of scandals.

From a famous judgment controversy in 2002 on bid bribery probes and even the resignation with a senior Olympic official filmed offering to sell tickets for the 2012 London games on the black market, the modern Games often feel vulnerable to bad actors. And although there is not much known controversy in betting on the Olympics, the huge increase in sports gambling in recent years – especially in the US, where the Supreme Court paved the way for the states to legalize it in 2018 and prediction markets like Kalshi have started again. enter the space—This is made a natural concern as we move towards 2026 Winter Games in Milan Cortina.

Now that hundreds of millions of people can bet on events using 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 cheating scandals that have rocked pro sports in recent years.

At least compared to other sporting events with similar name recognition such as Super Bowl and the World Cupthe Olympics is a surprisingly small deal in the North American sports betting sector.

“Our (handle) of the Kentucky Derby Friday-Saturday is more than the entire Olympics,” said Jeffrey Benson, sports operations manager for Circa, one of the world’s largest sportsbooks.

Several factors make the Olympics more difficult to bet on effectively. The time difference between Italy and the US is a variable; Events that occur while most Americans are sleeping naturally attract less attention. Many Olympic events also include preliminary rounds and medal rounds, which create additional logistical challenges for sportsbooks; they have to pull the lines down after the prelims and make all new ones for the final rounds.

For many of the more niche sports, especially the Winter Olympics, traditional sports books are simply not considered worth the work of creating an event so that people can bet on it. Benson said Circa expects the 2026 Winter Games to account for less than 0.01 percent of the total bets taken for the calendar year.

Not all betting platforms pay little attention to the Olympics.

“A lot of these events are really what you do with them as a sportsbook and how willing you are to do the work and get the bets,” said Adam Bjorn, CEO of Plannatech, a global betting technology platform.

Bjorn said some betting platforms, especially outside of North America, are taking a “decent amount” of the Olympics. Many of them set lines and bet on every single event, no matter how vague, although doing so may leave them vulnerable to bettors who know more about specific sports. Bjorn suggested that some of these sportsbooks would even mark anomalies as loss leaders, which would help attract new casual clients attracted by the popularity of the Game.

Ice hockey is a headliner for the Winter Olympics in the sports betting world, no wonder given the presence of NHL players in the top national teams. Bjorn believes that many of the non-US books will work in these games rather than the average NHL game.

Even in smaller markets, entities like the IOC are naturally concerned about the integrity of betting, especially given the Games’ recent scandal-ridden history. The governing body is that actively involved to monitor the Olympic betting markets since the 2012 and 2014 Games through the OM Unit PMC (Olympic Movement Unit on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competitions), which is said to be using its Integrity Betting Intelligence System, or IBIS.

That’s a lot of impressive acronyms, but what do groups like this actually do? And are they effective?

Watching the Detectives

As long as there have been legal sports gambling platforms, people have tried to take advantage of them. That requires the presence of integrity agencies, which have existed in some form for decades.

These agencies, says Bjorn, grew into their modern form in the early to mid-2000s largely in response to widespread match-fixing scandals in professional tennis. These incidents led to the formation in 2008 of the Tennis Integrity Unit, which Bjorn says was one of the first such groups to rely heavily on data-driven analysis to proactively detect malfeasance. By tracking live betting patterns at various sportsbooks and networks, the integrity agency can spot suspicious bets that could signal collusion, match-fixing, or similar attempts to defraud the system.