It hasn’t quite been the joyous build-up Brazilian authorities had been hoping for ahead of this week’s Rio Olympics, with the status of Russia’s drug-fueled team, a largely unfinished athletes’ village and serious health concerns over a number of Olympic venues making global headlines.
But there is one area in which we’re certain these Games will hit new heights – mobile Olympic betting. Rio will represent the third time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has allowed betting on its famous sporting festival but the first time sportsbooks and gamblers alike have been truly ready to embrace it.
Certainly Beijing in 2008, harnessed with the added burden of China’s anti-gambling bent, was never going to become the focus of an iGaming industry still in its infancy at the time with online operators turning over a meager US$4.5 million over the course of the two weeks.
Fast forward to London 2012 and a considerably more mature mobile gaming sector saw that figure soar to almost US$90 million. But it is only in the last one or two years that iGaming as a whole has truly started to fulfil its vast potential both in the scope of the products it offers and its appeal to today’s mobile generation.
With that in mind, it has been predicted that online betting turnover on the 2016 Rio Olympics will come in at a whopping US$1 billion – a figure that, not surprisingly, seems to have turned a few heads.
Guanabara Bay – home of the sailing events at the Rio Olympics
Last month, the US state of Nevada lifted its 15-year ban on all forms of Olympic betting due to fears the state’s sportsbooks would be missing out on the action. And the IOC itself, despite the usual calls to keep gambling away from Olympic competition, has recognized the futility of this approach, opting instead to work alongside operators in a regulated industry.
Last week it signed an agreement with the European Sport Security Association (ESSA) that will see the organization monitor betting activity on all 306 Olympic sports and immediately raise the alarm should any irregularities appear.
Of course, the very fact the IOC and other sporting bodies feel compelled to take such action highlights the inevitable dangers that come when sport and gambling mix. But likewise, the explosive growth of online and mobile sports betting is an unmistakable tick of approval from the younger generation that this is how they want to be entertained.
At the very least this mobile betting revolution gifts Rio a new avenue from which to increase its audience reach. It’s just ironic that a city in which the very real causes of death include the exposed wires in your athletes’ quarters or inhaling the ocean water you’ll compete in should be the same city bringing the Olympics into the modern world.
