Integrity a Hot Topic on Day 1 of Symposium

The first speaker at the University of Arizona's Global Symposium on Racing focused on two main themes that will continue on through the two-day event—sports wagering and integrity.

The keynote address Dec. 4 in Tucson, Ariz., titled "Integrity in the World of Commercial Sport," was delivered by Jack Anderson, a professor of sports law at Melbourne Law School who warned those in attendance about current and future issues to expect as sports wagering begins to widen across the United States.

Anderson said that while U.S. sports lead the way in the "commercialism of sport," they are "behind when it comes to integrity issues." Of those "integrity issues," he mostly focused on the fixing of results in sporting events.

How that relates to the horse racing industry, which has dealt with those types of issues for seemingly as long as horses have been racing, will continue to evolve as legalized sports wagering spreads to racing jurisdictions. Anderson warned integrity issues can drag once "mainstream" sports out of the general public's consciousness.

"You can easily slip from the mainstream if there are integrity threats around you," Anderson said. "And you can see it in other sports. Look at track and field and cycling post Lance (Armstrong) and the doping corruption. ... And look at greyhound racing, which is one of my favorite sports, and how it's slipped away. There is one track left in the greater London area, the heartland of the sport. I work in Australia and two or three years ago New South Wales attempted to ban the sport ... and now we hear about Florida. You can slip very quickly."

Another theme from Anderson's presentation was that the "threat always comes from within" and while outside influences can spur fixing or cheating in "episodic games," the action needs to be made by "an individual" who can "take control of the flow of a game. An experienced jockey can be able to get that horse in trouble."

Anderson also spoke to the lack of whistle-blowers in sports, including in racing.

"It's an important integrity point for you in racing. We try all the time to gain intelligence from the racing community to see what's going on, and one of the key things to do is the whistle-blowing factor," he said. "Sport does whistle-blowing very poorly. ... Because the community is quite small, it's difficult in a sense to promote whistle-blowers."

Later in the presentation Anderson touched on the integrity threat of money laundering in gambling. With a winning wager money can not only be cleansed but it can return more money for an extra profit. He even went so far as to say money laundering is the "No. 1 threat" to the integrity of sport.

"The process is very simple. We have international criminal syndicates that illicit profits from narcotics, et cetera, laundering money—as they've always done—through gambling," Anderson said. "And if the event is fixed in their favor, their hot money is freshly laundered and they make a profit. And that profit is then invested in their business. That's the No. 1 integrity threat for international sport—not doping any more. It's money laundering."

He said the key to combating those types of integrity issues is the sharing of data. That data can alert operators and regulators of red flags like irregular betting activity, but Anderson indicated some are apprehensive to share.

"They are very weary, quite rightly, of giving raw, commercial data back to sports bodies," he said. "Do sports bodies have the capacity to deal with that information, in terms of analyzing it and keeping it secure? What they've developed in the UK, and in France, and in Australia, is an independent national regulator—a betting integrity unit—that has the capacity to deal with that. And where those red lines are flagged, there's options. You can send it back to the sport, for a sport-specific investigation, or you can send it to criminal authorities."

The U.S. has been dealing with gambling's impact on sport for at least a century—from the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919 to the Interstate Wire Act of 1961—but Anderson stressed diligence as the industry evolves.

"You've done it before. You're going to have to do it again," he said.

Anderson wrapped up his presentation with the iconic photo of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston during their title fight in 1965.

"We are now almost certain that it was a fixed fight," Anderson said. "Liston took a dive. Ali didn't know about it, but Liston took a dive because he had gambling debts. If you don't protect the integrity of your sport—your bottom line, your sport will take a dive."