Betting on the beast: gambling's wild run through athletics

“A moving beast”. That’s how David Howman, chair of the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) – an independent body that regulates doping and other forms of ethical misconduct in athletics – describes the incorporation of professional running into global gambling markets.

Gambling is gaining fast on professional running – drafting behind the sport’s push to break out of its every-four-years Olympic lane and become a year-round global entertainment business. That push is on display in Budapest this week, where the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship opens on Friday: three days, 28 disciplines, a made-for-television format, and a record $10 million prize.

The expansion of the Diamond League, the financialization of the World Marathon Majors, the proliferation of road races across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and the growth of competitor leagues, have all contributed to a speculative boom.

Unlike football or tennis, where betting has long been a visible and sometimes scandal-ridden part of the sport, athletics is only beginning to be recognised as a potential wagering product. But the concerns it raises are not new. The sport borrows lessons from the profound doping crisis that has reshaped how it understands integrity, risk, and credibility.

In Kenya, for instance, where many high-profile cases were reported, the sanctioned athletes are only the visible layer. Beneath them lies a global labour market so precarious that pharmaceutical enhancement becomes a rational strategy. The gambling industry, Howman suggests, has the potential to thrive in such conditions: “The concerns lie with both regulated and unregulated markets,” he told Play the Game.

The AIU incorporated “competition manipulation” into its mandate, under the Integrity Code of World Athletics, the sport’s governing body. Howman describes the change as a response to gambling's expansion in the sport. This aligns track and field with the broader International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s anti-manipulation unit, and with the global infrastructure of betting-monitoring firms and data analysts that watch global sport.

However, significant integrity and safety risks remain underexplored, underregulated, and under-communicated among stakeholders – media, athletes, and athlete personnel. These gambling-related issues are often overshadowed by the attention and resources centred on curbing doping.

An uneven betting track

The international nature of professional running means that diverse cultural and societal norms are present as athletes compete in different legal regimes. While in some countries sports betting is illegal, the practice has long been in place in several places in Europe.

In the UK, betting platforms have listed odds for the London Marathon, as well as the Zurich-based meets Diamond League and Weltklasse Diamond League. For years, fans have been able to place bets in person while watching these events.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court struck down a federal law that banned sports betting, leading to a meteoric rise in online sports betting domestically and worldwide. In 2024, Americans wagered nearly $150 billion on sports, up 23.5% from 2023.

The U.S. is an important market for athletics. It hosts three of the six World Marathon Majors – New York, Chicago and Boston, and the Olympics will come to Los Angeles in 2028. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has been explicit about growing the sport there. He told the LA Times in 2022 about “Project USA”, a plan to make track and field the country’s fifth most popular sport by 2028 – up three places from 2019.

Yet World Athletics has not embraced gambling in the same way that some other major sports have. While American teams and leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), and Major League Baseball (MLB) have established partnerships with sportsbooks, the frequency with which odds are offered for professional running is inconsistent.

Fans, media, and athletes often lament this inconsistency. Not only do these partnerships generate sponsorship amounts in the millions, but they have also increased popularity, viewing hours, and subsequent broadcasting partnerships.

In 2023, it was major news when Massachusetts gambling regulators denied a request by DraftKings to offer betting odds on that year’s Boston Marathon. Scott Stover, the chief marketing officer for the Boston Athletic Association (BAA), noted that they were not confident the event could proceed without ensuring the sanctity of the race.

Sports journalist Darren Rovell tweeted that it was a “missed opportunity”, and Martin Fritz Huber later reported that race organisers and stakeholders believed the sport “needed” gambling.

Chris Chavez, founder of Citius Mag – an American-based media company, told Play the Game that gambling is important for the sport’s professionalisation.

“You look at all the other major sports, and you can gamble on them – and we just haven’t been able to gamble. It would give the current population of fans more to get invested with certain athletes and races”, Chavez said. “On top of that, you would attract the subset of sports fans that only watch for betting purposes – there is something to an audience growth.”

Yet the relationship between gambling and sporting integrity is older and more complicated than the current betting boom suggests. John Gleaves, a sports historian who has studied the historical relationship between gambling and anti-doping regulation – particularly in relation to horse racing – argues that wagering helped produce some of the basic infrastructure through which modern sport establishes credible results.

“Gambling is genuinely responsible for the evidentiary infrastructure of sport: the insistence on precise timing, official record-keeping, standardised rules enforced the same way every time, credentialed officials, and statistics kept as a matter of course,” Gleaves told Play the Game.

In other words, gambling has not simply threatened the integrity of sport from the outside. The demand for results that bettors could trust also helped make sport more measurable, standardised, and auditable.

Grand Slam’s short run

Grand Slam Track (GST) filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2025, felled by cash-flow problems and lower-than-expected attendances. But its inaugural season, launched that April, had promised to revolutionise the sport.

The league was conceived as a new model for track and field competition – designed around head-to-head races featuring contracted star athletes, enhanced prize money, and fan-centric storytelling, all intended to elevate the profile and commercial appeal of professional track outside traditional championship circuits.

Prior to the launch, in May 2024, Play the Game spoke with four-time Olympic champion track-and-field sprinter Michael Johnson, who founded GST, about the prospect of gambling in the sport. Johnson noted that, “while there is risk, the one benefit that track would have is drawing lessons from other sports – boxing, horse racing, tennis – about how to minimise the risk of cheating”.

Johnson specifically referenced tennis because of a major match-fixing scandal that began in 2014, when a law student in Brussels learned that low-earning players could be corrupted and lured in over 180 athletes over the course of a few years. This became a transnational criminal syndicate, which managed to generate over eight million U.S. dollars before a five-year Belgian investigation ended the scandal.

“You have to go in and know what the challenges are and know that the reward is worth the risk”, he added. “If you are not, as a sport, or a governing body, or a league, prepared to give it all the resources, attention, and diligence that’s required to mitigate that risk, then you shouldn’t lean into gambling. But I do think it could be a good thing.”

Ultimately, GST faced financial problems, accumulating more than $30 million in debts to athletes, vendors, and other partners. By the time it went bankrupt, the league had only a tiny amount of cash on hand. Yet, its organisers expressed a desire to restructure and potentially return in 2026 – a move World Athletics called “unconscionable” before the league settles its 2025 debts.

Opportunities for manipulation

Athletics is unusually vulnerable to gambling markets. Most races involve dozens of competitors. Performances fluctuate substantially from one competition to the next. And outcomes often hinge on injuries, pacing strategies, travel fatigue, or tactical decisions that outsiders cannot easily observe.

These conditions create opportunities not only for conventional race-fixing but also for subtler forms of manipulation: deliberately underperforming, sharing privileged information about fitness or injuries, or influencing secondary betting markets where a victory need not be guaranteed.

Other sports show how the proliferation of smaller betting markets can multiply these opportunities. Danny Funt, journalist and author of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling argues that the expansion of proposition bets has made manipulation possible without fixing the outcome of an entire competition.

“Fixers no longer have to be so bold as throw the outcome of an entire game,” Funt told Play the Game. A basketball player, for example, could manipulate something as narrow as the number of three-pointers they make in the first half.

For athletics, the equivalent possibilities could be remarkably granular. A runner need not throw an entire race: depending on what markets are offered, manipulation could potentially involve placing, split, qualifying time, withdrawal, or other component of performance.

There is a historical precedent for precisely this kind of manipulation in racing. Gleaves points to horse racing, where doping and corruption were not always designed to improve performance. “If a heavily backed horse was expected to win, the money to be made wasn't necessarily in improving a longshot; it was in nobbling the favourite”, Gleaves said.

Athletics presents a contemporary version of this vulnerability. As Howman observed, “An athlete does not necessarily have to win, or even lose outright, to affect a betting market.”

These possibilities extend beyond athletes themselves. Media members typically correspond with agents and coaches before races to get insight into an athlete’s fitness; other athletes’ training staff casually discuss workouts and performance indicators with friends and family; in some cases, athletes may even unintentionally post readiness indicators on their social media accounts.

As a result, word that once circulated informally within elite athletics now carries increasing financial value. Gleaves notes that the original sporting meaning of “inside dope” referred to privileged information about a racehorse’s condition held by trainers, stable hands and veterinarians but unavailable to bettors.

Integrity, therefore, has always depended not only on detecting manipulated performances, but also on regulating the flow of information surrounding competition.

AIU’s stretched thin

The AIU’s 2024 report puts the governing body’s total operating cost for the year at 11,897,586 USD. After staffing costs (4,600,884 USD), the most significant expenditure was the testing program at 4,475,561 USD. Investigations and intelligence (I&I), which includes “competition manipulation,” was allocated 305,049 USD.

The I&I team closely monitored the Paris Olympic Games to flag unusual betting patterns and, while no individual issues were raised, “this work identified that the global gambling market is growing in track and field and road running”, the report reads.

Howman recognised this resource gap. “We need more resources, and we’re looking at ways and means of achieving that”, he explained, “but we also got to look at ways of living within our means”. The I&I department covers far more than betting regulation, with responsibilities including regulation of age manipulation, safeguarding, and doping cases, meaning that an even smaller portion of resources has been regularly used to monitor competition manipulation.

Prior to January 2026, there had been no AIU cases of competition manipulation involving betting, although some investigations have revealed other forms of manipulation not frequently discussed in the media that could have direct or indirect implications for odds fixing.

The most visible application of this framework was AIU’s 2022-23 prosecution of senior officials of the Albanian Athletics Federation for falsifying competition documentation to secure Olympic qualification. Framed legally as “competition manipulation”, the case did not involve proven wagering profits or criminal betting syndicates.

Instead, it revolved around the strategic alteration of performance data and evidentiary records – precisely the kinds of informational infrastructures on which both sporting legitimacy and betting markets depend.

The AIU has retrospectively presented this case as a warning that manipulation of results, documents, and qualification pathways undermines trust in the sport and must be governed with tools analogous to those used in established betting environments.

Howman recognises that gambling, and particularly the unregulated gambling market, presents new challenges that often fall outside of the scope of sports governance and onto national governing bodies.

“Nobody is addressing the unregulated market”, Howman said. “Everyone talks about it, but they can only go so far as the regulated market takes them. If you start putting insiders into organised crime, you’re probably drifting into something that is a government, country, or society’s responsibility – not sport. And therefore, you’re sort of drifting from your mandate.”

Who Can Bet

Another issue is that the rules on who can bet are neither widely known nor consistently enforced. The AIU has established a set of rules athletes must follow. They must not bet on their own event or on any athletics competition where they are participating; manipulate a competition or fix a result; share inside information; or accept undue benefits such as gifts, money, or hospitality. They must also report “anything suspicious if [they] believe it to be unethical”.

However, Howman notes, educating athletes on gambling boundaries is a tricky endeavour. The AIU plans to use its drug-testing pool as a platform to publicise breaches it uncovers, which could help educate some of the 800 athletes registered in it. “We want to give a lot more attention to gambling but accentuate the need for athletes and their entourage to be aware of their responsibilities”, he says.

Many athletes have also admitted that they are unsure who they can talk to about basic things like race readiness or injury. Speaking off the record with Play the Game, one GST athlete whose friends were excited at the prospect of gambling on him, asked: “Can I let my friends know if I feel great? I don’t want them to bet on me if I know I’m injured.”

In late January 2026, the governing body announced the first sanctions in track and field explicitly related to betting violations. Two athletes – a French and a German – were penalised after investigations found that they had placed bets on athletics competitions in which they were involved, violating the World Athletics Integrity Code’s prohibition. Both athletes stated that they were unaware of the rules and maintained that they had not sought to manipulate competition.

The gambling sanctions framed the case as a “zero-tolerance” demonstration. Although the sanctions did not involve evidence of race-fixing or organised corruption, the decision marked a new phase in the sport’s governance of competition manipulation: the governing body now strives to actively police athlete behaviour within expanding wagering markets.

The issue is not that small bits of information capable of impacting a gambler’s odds inevitably circulate, but that “sharing of information” is an inherent part of the sport and a nebulous concept to many.

Ethical Considerations: the uneven cost of integrity

While athletes are expected to report anything suspicious, social science research indicates that ethics are culturally, socially, and economically contingent. The expansion of gambling-related integrity regimes in global athletics raises ethical questions that extend well beyond the technical prevention of match-fixing.

At stake are the conditions under which athletes labour, the asymmetries of information and power embedded in data-driven surveillance systems, and the uneven moral and legal landscapes through which “integrity” is defined and enforced.

As with doping, the risks of corruption and sanction do not fall evenly across the sport. Athletes from low-income backgrounds and from countries with weak legal protections often operate within dense networks of obligation to family, agents, and sponsors, while lacking access to independent legal counsel or institutional advocacy.

In such contexts, the line between coercion, inducement, and voluntary participation in ethically dubious practices can be blurred. Integrity regimes that rely primarily on punitive enforcement – without corresponding investment in education, legal literacy, and economic security – risk reproducing a familiar pattern in which structural vulnerability is reframed as individual moral failure.

Also, ethical norms surrounding gambling are culturally and economically contingent. In some settings, wagering is normalised as entertainment and tightly regulated; in others, it is criminalised, stigmatised, or interwoven with informal economies. The expectation that athletes will immediately recognise, report, and resist corrupt approaches assumes a universal moral framework that does not account for differing social obligations, financial pressures, or experiences with state authority.

As social science research has long shown, “ethics” are not abstract principles alone but lived practices shaped by material conditions and histories of trust or mistrust in institutions. Integrity education that ignores these differences risks being formally compliant yet substantively ineffective.

In this sense, the ethical challenge facing global athletics is not simply how to prevent race-fixing before it occurs, but how to build integrity systems that are socially just, transparent, and attentive to the unequal conditions under which athletes compete and labour. The credibility of pre-emptive integrity will ultimately depend not only on technological monitoring, but on whether the sport’s expansion into gambling economies is matched by an equally serious commitment to fairness, accountability, and athlete welfare.

Betting in the dark

There is at present an asymmetry between the speed with which gambling-style integrity regimes are being installed and the limited public knowledge about how, where, and to what extent athletics is actually being bet on.

Unlike football, there is no comprehensive public mapping of wagering markets for track and field, no systematic disclosure of which competitions are offered by major bookmakers, and no transparent account of what kinds of in-play or micro-markets (splits, lap leaders, national placings, qualification standards) may already exist on regulated or offshore platforms.

Integrity monitoring thus operates in a space of partial visibility, relying on proprietary data, confidential alerts, and algorithmic risk assessments that are largely inaccessible to athletes, journalists, and even many federation officials.

The betting industry has often presented monitoring as one of the integrity benefits of legalisation: regulated wagers leave data trails through which unusual activity can potentially be detected. Funt is sceptical.

From his reporting, he describes the claim as “somewhere between naive and disingenuous”. Legal betting does not eliminate illegal wagering, he argues, while the enormous proliferation of legal prop bets creates another problem: monitors must distinguish manipulation from increasingly ordinary-looking wagers across a vast number of markets.

“Many fixed bets fly under the radar,” Funt said. “People now bet big money on all sorts of random things, and integrity monitors can't possibly investigate all of those transactions.”

History suggests that integrity monitoring infrastructure cannot be an afterthought.

“A sport that backs into a gambling-driven audience without first building the monitoring, enforcement, and transparency that horse racing eventually had to build the hard way, is essentially borrowing against its own credibility,” Gleaves said.

That warning is particularly relevant for athletics because the sport is attempting to expand its audience at the same moment that the boundaries of its betting markets remain remarkably opaque.

This opacity matters because the contemporary growth model of international running is deeply entangled with the same processes that make sports attractive to gambling operators: the real-time circulation of performance data, the standardisation of results across platforms, and the monetisation of attention.

Timing systems, live-results feeds, broadcast graphics, and athlete-tracking technologies are not only tools of sporting administration and fan engagement; they are also the infrastructural preconditions for betting markets.

As performance becomes ever more finely measured, packaged, and sold – by data companies, media rights holders, and event organisers – it simultaneously becomes more easily transformed into a financial instrument.