- Three track and field athletes got suspended for placing bets on their teammates at world competitions.
- World Athletics bans all athlete betting to keep sports fair, but the German athletes said they didn’t know about the rule.
- Studies show betting is common among pro athletes, with most top Swedish soccer players and many college athletes gambling regularly.
MONACO – Three track and field athletes landed in serious trouble after placing bets on their teammates during major international meets, sparking debate about how strict the rules should be for athletes and gambling. The Athletics Integrity Unit handed out suspensions to French middle-distance runner Aurore Fleury and German discus throwers Henrik Janssen and Steven Richter for breaking the sport’s betting policies.
Fleury was given the harshest punishment, a six-month suspension and a $3,600 fine for her $2,400 bet on a teammate at the 2024 European Championships in Rome, which brought in close to $6,000. On the other hand, Janssen and Richter were punished for three months after making far lesser wagers of $120 and $50 during the World Championships in Tokyo last September.
The Rules and the Reality
To preserve the integrity of the sport, World Athletics strictly prohibits betting. It is evident from the policy that athletes are not allowed to wager on events within their discipline, whether it is a teammate’s event, their own performance, or any other competitor’s. World Athletics Series Events including significant multi-sport contests like the Olympics, where legal Olympic betting markets draw a lot of attention from supporters worldwide, are also prohibited.
The interesting thing about these situations is that the two German athletes said they honestly didn’t know betting was off-limits. People apparently heard them talking about their bets at the event, and they only found out it broke the rules when somebody else clued them in. They immediately tried to cancel their wagers but couldn’t.
Brett Clothier from the AIU mentioned that not knowing the betting rules played a big part in how they decided the punishments. The three athletes had clean records before this, admitted everything immediately, and felt bad about what happened. One of their penalties was having to finish the IOC’s online course on match-fixing prevention.
The gambling problem goes way beyond track and field. A 2025 study showed that over 60% of top Swedish football players had bet money in the past year, and 72% of them used legal sports betting sites. College athletes showed similar patterns, with roughly a quarter of male NCAA players saying they had placed sports bets during that same stretch.
These occurrences bring to light an increasingly pressing issue for global sports organizations. The challenging challenge of educating athletes about appropriate boundaries while preserving the fairness and legitimacy that characterize competitive sports falls on regulatory organizations as countries with legal sports betting continue to expand their industries.
