16Oct

How to Survive an International Sports Integrity Conference

You ain’t in Kansas anymore Dorothy. Back in the day, international sports integrity conferences - like Play the Game, happening right now in Colorado Springs - were jovial affairs where independent journalists, saddened whistle-blowers and beleaguered sports officials could meet, chat, drink and sometimes dance. Now, everything has changed. Sports are battle grounds of geopolitical soft power. Hard power is the idea that you can conquer another country with tanks, planes and lots of death. Soft power is the idea that you can...

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16Aug

’Sometimes we fixed more games than we could bet’

In an exclusive interview with Play the Game, a former match-fixer tells how effectively criminal syndicates are still manipulating sports results despite all initiatives against it. The whole approach against match-fixing could be wrong, Declan Hill reports.  This was first printed at: https://www.playthegame.org/news/news-articles/2019/0584_sometimes-we-fixed-more-games-than-we-could-bet/ ** The knock came late at night. Marko Stanovic – whose name has been changed to help protect him from the mob – was in one of the world’s great match-fixing gangs. A group whose criminal ties stretched deep...

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14May

The Pearl Harbor of U.S. Sports Gambling: 7 points on the Supreme Court Decision

There are certain days and events in history where everything changes. One day is ‘before’ - then the event happens and everything is changed ‘after’ that moment.  You can choose your personal moment in history: September 11th, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Pearl Harbor, Black Tuesday and the Great Depression, the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, etc, etc… Today, in sports, was one of those events. The American Supreme Court struck down a decades-old law prohibiting sports gambling in the United...

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20Sep

The ‘Secret’ Report for WADA

Below is the confidential paper on building an investigative culture in a corrupt sports world that I wrote for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Think Tank held in Lausanne on September 20th. It was supposed to be secret but some craven twit leaked it to his pals in the media within 24-hours of it being circulated. Now that a number of journalists have read it, I have no hesitation in making it public. The headlines are: 1)     World Anti-Doping Agency is not...

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