Sports Betting Is Skyrocketing. Will It Take Over the Olympics?

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.