Gearing up for Beijing 2022
With less than three months to go to the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, preparations for an awareness-raising campaign about the risk of competition manipulation, targeted at athletes, their entourage and officials, are in full swing.
The campaign, “Make the right decision”, which is led by the OM Unit PMC and was also implemented successfully in the run-up to Tokyo 2020, will be activated shortly online. The initiative will be also pushed by winter athlete ambassadors, who will be revealed in December. Peer-to-peer communication on this particular topic has proved most successful in the past. Athletes and other Games participants travelling to Beijing will be also invited to take an e-learning course, which teaches them how to recognise suspicious behaviour and what to do when confronted with concrete situations of competition manipulation. In addition, the OM Unit PMC will run customised webinars for National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and the Winter International Federations (IFs) to raise awareness of the topic among their delegations and to explain the robust rules and processes in place.
Awareness-raising measures can have an important preventative effect. During the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, no incident was reported and no disciplinary or law enforcement action was taken related to Olympic events.
Also, for Beijing 2022, a risk assessment is currently being prepared for all the winter sports and disciplines which will be shared with the Winter IFs on a one-to-one basis. During the Games, the 24/7 monitoring of all Olympic events will be in place again, ensuring that all the necessary intelligence is received in relation to any suspicion of any potential irregularity. For this purpose, the OM Unit PMC via the Integrity Betting Intelligence System (IBIS) will be cooperating with its monitoring partners, including associations of betting operators (GLMS, IBIA) and Sportradar, but also the Council of Europe’s network of national platforms (Group of Copenhagen).