How Online Gambling Forces Athletes to Battle Hecklers on Their Own
Increasingly, digital betting is exacerbating social media attacks against stars like sprinter Gabby Thomas—and the athletes are taking matters into their own hands.
As a triple Olympic champion, Sports Illustrated and Vogue model, and Harvard alum, sprinter Gabby Thomas attracts thousands of fans wherever she competes. She also attracts some genuine weirdos.
Last weekend, for example, a man attending Thomas’ race in Philadelphia began to loudly berate her—yelling that she was a “choke artist” and that she was “goin’ down.” Thomas finished fourth, and on Monday, the man tweeted a video of his antics as well as screenshots of wagers he placed on FanDuel. “I made Gabby lose by heckling her,” he boasted. “And it made my parlay win.”
As Arena readers are well aware, athlete harassment is a huge problem for the sports industry, with teams and leagues needing to hire third-party help to offset the retreat of social media companies from content moderation. But individual athletes like Thomas don’t have the support staff or financial resources of a club and have to confront such abuse on their own. Compounding it all is the rapid legalization of sports betting in the U.S., which is giving gamblers a financial motivation to make trouble in stadiums and online.