Betting bans in sport are usually described as a rule against players gambling. The Olympic Movement Code on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competitions is wider than that, and the wider parts are the ones that catch people who never placed a bet.
The dates
- 2006 — the IOC Code of Ethics barred participants from betting on Olympic events.
- December 2015 — the IOC Executive Board adopted the Olympic Movement Code on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competitions, a single instrument for the whole movement.
The 2015 Code did not invent the betting prohibition. It gathered the prohibitions into one text with definitions, and made it adoptable by every organisation in the movement so that the same conduct is defined the same way across sports.
The four prohibitions
- Betting — a participant may not bet on a competition in which they are involved, directly or through another person.
- Manipulation — altering the course or result of a competition to remove its unpredictable character, with or without a bet behind it.
- Inside information — using or passing on information known by virtue of a position, where it is not public, for betting or any other purpose covered by the code.
- Failure to report — a participant who knows of an approach or of conduct under the code and does not report it commits an offence by that omission.
The third and fourth are the ones people fail without intending to. Passing on a team-sheet before it is published, to someone who then bets, is an offence under the code even for someone who never gambled.
The link to state law
The code was drafted to align with article 7 of the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, which deals with the obligations of sports organisations. That alignment is what lets a sports disciplinary case and a criminal investigation describe the same facts with the same vocabulary, in jurisdictions that have ratified the convention. What the two routes do not share is their timing: a disciplinary body can remove a participant from competition before anything is proved, and that measure is a different instrument from a sanction — see Provisional suspension is not ineligibility.
Where the national rules diverge
A movement-wide code sets the floor. Leagues and national bodies write their own rules above it, and those have moved recently — American college sport dropped part of its prohibition while keeping the rest, as set out in the entry on the NCAA rule change. An athlete under both regimes is bound by the stricter.
Where this is written: the Olympic Movement Code on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competitions and the IOC Code of Ethics, olympics.com/ioc/integrity; the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions at coe.int/en/web/conventions.