Hands up who takes Lotto? I do from time to time. It’s a family legacy but I don’t really have the same urge as the rest of the clan. My Dad got us into the habit us with stories of what he would do with the winnings if we hit the jackpot. “We’ll take all the kids – and their kids – to Disneyland.” “Then pay of the mortgage”, he’d sometimes add.
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At least he had his priorities in order.
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A couple of years ago my Uncle actually won $65,000 on a scratchy while he – a Kiwi - was in Oz, and he vowed to keep to the family tradition, taking his son and daughter their spouses and kids (8 in all) on the hallowed trip, just 6 months later.
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Dreams rarely live up to the reality (hey, except for dreams of riding great single-track!) and 6 months later it didn’t end as happily as anyone had hoped.
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Well, at least the thought was there. It hasn’t stopped Dad from continuing to spout the same story. “We know where he went wrong and darn it, we won’t make the same mistakes!”.
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Heaven help our close-knit family if it actually happens.
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So the other day I’m in the city foraging for supplies (read: buying breakfast cereal for work) and was regaled by a small built and smartly dressed guy – could have been a jockey – handing out brochures to unsuspecting wayfarers like myself.
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The barely scanned pamphlet went into one of the bags…something about FREE ENTRY, which could have been anything but the word FREE still gets the hormones going. If only it didn’t come with so many NOT REALLY FREE strings attached.
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Unpacking the food booty at work I caught sight of the aforementioned handout. “FREE ENTRY to Greyhound Racing”. Ahhhh. I forget this marginalized sport exists except when visiting Mum & Dad and they are watching the TAB channel. A rare day at the horse races can be fun but Greyhound Racing seems like it belongs in some black & white gritty movie from the 60’s.
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Commuting home on the bike, I got to thinking about how Australians are gambling mad. Why don’t we gamble on MTB? Does anyone, anywhere? Is it because the sport is so small? I looked up gambling statistics and found there’s a bit of money in it… In NSW Sports Gaming is worth 1.5B out of nearly 4.5B Australia-wide…. Now wouldn’t we like to see just 0.1% of that go towards MTB? $4.5M could do heaps.
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Sadly, sports other than horseracing account for just 6.5% of those billions, but some of the sports listed in the TAB are not that well known in Australia either. You can bet on all these:
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AFL, American Football, Baseball, Basketball, Boxing, Cricket, Cycling (road), Golf, League, Motor Sport, Netball, Rugby Union, Soccer,
Tennis, Politics – party of the next AU PM/Vic Prem/NSW Prem!!! Who’d have thought you could gamble on those?
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But even if we could slip MTB into the list, there’s the hint of corruption when you start to talk big bets.
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Nikolay Davydenko, major tennis player in ATP Ranking was at the center of a match-fixing investigation in 2007. That touched off a wider scandal in tennis in which at least a dozen ranked players said they had been asked to throw matches or had heard of similar approaches to others.
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Tennis’s major governing bodies commissioned a report, which recommended that 45 matches played in the previous five years be investigated further because betting patterns gave a “strong indication” that gamblers were profiting from inside information. As a result, they set up a Tennis Integrity Unit.
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The ATP cleared Davydenko of fixing the 2007 match even though they were unable to review the phone records of Davydenko’s wife and brother, which were first withheld and then destroyed.
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 “A lot of money is being able to be made outside of what’s happening on the court,” said one Australian player. “Sometimes that has a little bit of a negative influence. But luckily enough, I think it doesn’t happen that often.”
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Proposition bets, Parlays, Progressive Parlays, Teasers Run Luck, Future wagers, Head-to-Head, Totalizator bets… all these betting types (list from Wikipedia) sound to me as hard to understand and therefore as risky as the CDO’s in the recent GFC…
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So, would gambling work with MTB? If they opened up betting on MTB races – say the next World Cup, here or somewhere in the world – would you bet?
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How would it change your thoughts about the sport? And how would it change the MTB Racing industry? Would the relatively down to earth and laid-back style of our top MTB riders alter?
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Would the clubs be in a better position if there was more money from these events? Or would we lose something important?
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Would it maybe broaden the audience? Would Australians start to get into MTB?
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Or should we not worry… with the internet already making it even easier for gambling is it actually inevitable?
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All this talk of gambling…my adrenaline is popping so now I’m off to buy a Lotto
1 comment to “50 on Sam in the First”
27th July 2010 at 11:16 pm by Grant Shatford
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From the SMH - corruption in Boxing: When the circus that Australian boxing has become rolled back into town, it held none of the bush romance of the boxing tents of old.
Allegations that Danny Green’s 29-second knockout of Paul Briggs in Perth last week was fixed have been vehemently denied by both camps. Betting agencies have adopted a euphemistic “dubious” and called for the International Boxing Organisation to mount an investigation.
Irrespective of the investigation’s outcome, the spectre of betting corruption looms over the sport.
Media reports of the fallout proffered various reasons for Briggs’ swift defeat: that he was in inadequate mental and physical shape; that he had lost his “will to take a punch”; that Western Australian authorities shouldn’t have sanctioned the bout due to his history of neurological problems; that Green’s glancing left hand connected with a supple part of his skull.
The gambling facts are less equivocal. The day of the fight there was a plunge across betting agencies for Briggs to be knocked out in the first or second round. One agency shortened its odds from $7 early in the day to even money. Others closed the market. Multiple bookmakers described the activity as unusual, with a spokesman for Centrebet stating: “We’ve never in the history of boxing seen so much go on a specific decision outcome.”