Sport is made for betting

The North Korean women's football team has been kicked out of the next World Cup (2015) and all the qualifying events after five players tested positive for steroids at the recent women's World Cup in Germany. The team doctor, Jong Ae Nam, who claimed that she had used a "Chinese remedy" based on musk deer glands to aid players who had been struck by lightning, was handed a six-year ban from the game as the five players all tested positive for steroids. It really is la-la land over there....

Unfortunately it always seems that the positive tests don't seem to come out until AFTER their careers are finished. In the 80s it was still a Cold War thing and positive tests were swept under the carpet. It has only been the last 20 years that American athletes, the really good American athletes not just lower-ranked scapegoats, have started being busted for steroid abuse (or other banned substances). Yet the hysteria and suspicion still lies with the 'unknown' or the evil enemy, namely Russia or China. Former US Champion Clay banned for doping violations (Reuters) - Former U.S. 200 meters champion Ramon Clay has been suspended for two years for using steroids and other banned substances from 2000-04, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said Friday. So in recent years from the US, we've had Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin, Antonio Pettigrew, C.J. Hunter, Tim Montgomery, Kelli White, Jerome Young.... For a full list of doping cases in athletics, visit Wikipedia ...

Sad news over the weekend with shamed British rugby league star Terry Newton taking his own life. Newton was serving a two-year ban for using human growth hormone, HGH. Only last month another high-profile athlete, American track star Antonio Pettigrew, took his own life after being exposed as having used HGH, despite it being back in his prime between 1997 and 2001. High-profile cyclist Marco Pantani took his own life in 2004 after years of allegations and suspensions over blood doping. Then there's the long list of professional athletes in a variety of sports, including wrestlers, cyclists and former Soviet bloc athletes who have been so screwed up by years of steroid abuse they've either taken their own lives or their hearts have seized. And of course, there's the famous case of Florence Griffith-Joyner who was never caught failing a dope test, but that was the era when USA Track and Field swept everything under the carpet, and Flo-Jo did wear ridiculous amounts of m...

Fair play to the IOC for being proactive and wanting to avoid any match-fixing scandals from ever tainting an Olympic Games. But it's a bit rich to single out betting as the evil one when over the years there have been numerous suspicious judging decisions in athletics, boxing and other sports to satisfy political agendas. Not to mention the old junkets and favours which used to be exchanged in order to succeed with a bid to host the Games. IOC sets up system to watch for illegal betting At last year's Beijing Games, the IOC used a system set up by FIFA for soccer to watch for irregular betting on Olympic competitions. The monitoring found that a wide array of bets were offered for all Olympic sports, but that bets laid were generally small — between $7 to $70, the IOC says. It says there were no cases of irregular betting. Firstly the title of the article is wrong - you can't 'monitor' illegal betting, the whole point of black market betting is that it's untrac...