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Touchline • Issue 15 • 3
FEATURES
04 Zlatan Ibrahimovic:
The Zlatan Factor
08 Changing lives
& inspiration:
There’s more to sports than
winning
11 Torching body fat
14 Iron Man:
Interview with Peter Robertson
18 Staying safe on the slopes
31 Saving the best ice in Australia
32 Australian sport:
A New Nadir?
FOCUS
06 Skiing in Norway
20 Playing Hard:
Viking Sports
24 Sport Focus:
Innebandy
SPECIAL
16 Legal Focus:
Failure to warn creates a slippery
liability slope for resort operator
22 Sports shorts
26 At Risk
28 Risk Management:
Injecting risk management
into performance
34 World sport news roundup
ALL BETS ARE OFF!
In 1998, United States Senator Bill Bradley, a former
NBA great, said
“I am not prepared to risk the values that sports instil in
youth just to add a few more dollars to state coffers ... .
State-sanctioned sports betting conveys the message that
sports are more about money than personal achievement
and sportsmanship ... . Sports betting threatens the
integrity of and public confidence in professional and
amateur team sports, converting sports from wholesome
athletic entertainment into a vehicle for gambling ... .”
Bradley’s bill, called the Professional Amateur Sports
Protection Act of 1992, banned gambling in all 50 US states, with a few exceptions,
such as horse racing, greyhound racing and jai alai. Four states were allowed to
continue other gambling that they already offered.
Not everyone would agree entirely with Bradley’s statement. The wholesale banning
or severe curtailment of betting would not only be extremely difficult to enforce – it
would just go underground - but it would also mean that the government would lose
many millions of tax revenue dollars. Also, let us be clear that gambling is a very
important source of income for professional sport, through sponsorship, fees and
advertising revenue. However, some of the rules surrounding gambling seem to have
been stretched or even broken recently.
Gambling is in the news big time in Australia, from allegations of insider knowledge
within the horse racing fraternity to match fixing in the IPL. At the ‘Our Sporting
Future’ forum in Melbourne in April, former Wallaby player, turned author and media
commentator Peter Fitzsimons said that the two greatest challenges facing sport are
betting and concussion. (In the next issue of Touchline we will discuss the issue of
concussion).
The Australian government has banned TV and radio networks promoting live odds
and restricted gambling advertisements during sporting matches. Some want the ban
to go further. Of even greater concern is the report from Fairfax Media that online
sports betting agencies are offering live odds on amateur games in Canberra, raising
the prospect of match-fixing in grassroots sport. This has resulted in a news report
of a player even betting on his side to lose an amateur gridiron match in a Victorian
league. Whilst there was no suggestion of corruption being involved, it is a worrying
development.
Severe sentences and lifetime bans on professional sportspeople who are engaged in
match fixing are essential in order to set examples.
Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard said, “Younger Australians in particular should
continue to talk about which is the best football team … not which team is at the
shortest odds to win a game.”
Sport is much more important in people’s lives than betting or money. In fact, in the
famous words of dear departed Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly, “Some people
think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than
that.”
Steve Boucher
touchline@sportscover.com
FROM THE EDITOR: