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Can pro sports survive?

January 27, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

This is obviously a rhetorical question. In many ways pro sports has never thrived more.  The big events, especially among elite participants in team sports – the World Cup of Soccer, Super Bowl of US football, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, even cricket and rugby world cups are more popular and profitable than they ever have been and betting on them is very big business. Although there have been some recent exceptions, most games at the highest level are  beyond the reach of the plague that is now tearing apart all individual sports and second and third rung team sports – results fixed through gambling.  It is  hard to see how a successful offer can be made to convince the extremely high paid stars of the elite tournaments to purposely lose a game.  They are paid too much to be interested in such deals, and in any case, just who could guarantee a loss for such highly talented teams, unless the whole team signs on, and that is not going to happen.

But this is not true of the players and the teams that lurk below the elites, and plenty of bets are made on their games, nor does this theory work as convincingly when it comes to individual sports.   Tennis is only the latest sport to come under serious suspicion, especially with regard to matches played just below the elite level, for which much betting takes place in any case.  Needless to say it is much easier to unexpectedly lose a match in tennis – a bunch  of bad returns, double faults, or sudden injuries will do the trick – than it is for a high-level football, rugby, hockey or basketball team to suddenly collapse.

And soon  we will  have the Olympics,  making its every fourth year stop, this time in Rio.  Poor track and field, the heart of the Olympics and once the mark of the pinnacle of individual performance, has been really seriously, if not fatally damaged by the other kind of cheating – the use of illegal substances to help you win, not lose as is the case in being paid to throw the result.  And the elite athletes in this are no longer anything like the amateurs who once performed.  Great amounts of money are at stake and the Olympic governors have been unable or unwilling to get unlimited doping under control.  This time it seems like the entire Russian track and field team may be banned  for drug abuse, and just about everyone in the know thinks that is just the tip of the iceberg.  The real victims here are the honest athletes who are playing by the rules.  Some of them may even be Russian.  Good luck to them!

Filed Under: Russia, Sports

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