Opening the actual program, the event featured the panel “Integrity in Professional Sport - Why is it important and what is at stake?” The consensus of the participants is that the legalization of sports betting is beneficial to sport and that it is important to involve all players in this scenario to ensure integrity.
Former Executive Director of the Brazilian Olympic Committee and Olympic Volleyball Medalist Marcus Vinícius Freire praised the initiative of the event and stressed the importance of athletes being heard. Among the advantages of legalizing the gambling market, he stressed the arrival of new revenues through sponsorship, not only for football but also for other modalities, investing in the creation and legalization of gambling sites and websites based in Brazil and also promoting science as statistics, for example.
Another point that the panel discussed was the need for education of young athletes to avoid approaching match fixing people. Present in the audience, former athlete and National Secretary of Sport, Luisa Parente, said that as are cross-cutting themes, the education of athletes on how to avoid dopping should serve as a basis to guide athletes also to avoid inappropriate approaches related to result manipulation. “Me, Luisa and other athletes know how hard it is to reach the podium and how always there are people offering an easier or faster way,” said Marcus Vinícius Freire.
For him, in addition to the education work of athletes, it is important that the market has ways to ensure only the entry of reputable operators, technologies and intelligence to detect deviations of standard and intelligence to combat bad behaviours. Other recommendations were the limitation of the type of competitions, minimum age for gamblers and a great deal of information to establish a transparent market free of the stigma attached to the gaming sector.
A recurring theme on the panel is that only athletes are penalized in cases such as dopping and also manipulation of results. One of the panelists, Martin Fernandez, Special Reporter of Globo Esporte, recalled a case of Thiaguinho, from Rio Branco do Paraná, who was tried and banned from football after being involved in an attempt to manipulate results at the Parana Championship last year. Fernandez stressed that not having public money directly involved in football on the one hand is good, but on the other hand leaves the sport out of control radars such as the Federal Police, prosecutors etc. "That's why the athlete is punished in the sporting sphere, but these cases do not generate an investigation that could result in the punishment of other actors in the result manipulation chain," he said.
Tatiana Mesquita Nunes, who is a Union Attorney and President of the Special Sports Secretariat's Anti-Doping Sports Court, pointed out that fighting attacks on integrity in sport is important, but even more important to prevent.
“When we talk about results manipulation, it is also important to highlight the difficulty of conducting an internal prevention work. Combating these frauds also involves modernizing the statues and improving control tools,” said Ian Cook, Kroll's Associate Executive Director, who also participated in the panel. “A club, a federation, will hardly be able to implement a complete culture of ethics and integrity if the structures make this kind of work unfeasible,” he said.
Source: Exclusive GMB
