Gary Hall Jr. wants sportsbooks pricing swimmers the way they price point guards. The ten-time Olympic medalist unveiled Anchor Line Sports on July 14, an exclusive partnership with betting-data firm ALT Sports Data built to pipe real-time odds on Olympic-category sports, starting with swimming, into licensed sportsbooks worldwide. The company will beta test at the 2026 U.S. Swimming National Championships in Irvine, California, then open to the public two weeks later at the Pan Pacific Championships.
The pitch fills a real gap. No major operator has ever built a serious swimming market, despite a global fan base that tracks world rankings and splits down to the hundredth of a second. But the same data that makes swimmers bettable, individual times attached to a single name rather than a scoreboard, is exactly the profile that NCAA research has already linked to the worst harassment bettors inflict on athletes in other sports.
A Betting Data Feed Built Just for Olympic Sports
Under the agreement, ALT Sports Data becomes the official global odds and distribution partner for Anchor Line Sports, feeding regulated pricing on Olympic-category events to sportsbook operators. Gary Hall Jr., the company’s founder and CEO, framed the opportunity in blunt terms: an estimated $12 billion was wagered on the 2024 Paris Olympics with no centralized betting hub, and he wants Olympic federations to finally get a piece of that.
ALT Sports Data is not new to this game. Founded in 2021 by former GoPro executives, the Carlsbad, California company has spent the past few years building betting infrastructure for sports the major operators had skipped over.
| Partner | Category | Milestone With ALT Sports Data |
|---|---|---|
| Formula 1 | Motorsport | Sportsbook data partnership accelerated through OpenBet, announced February 2026 |
| bet365 | Sportsbook operator | Global distribution deal announced March 2026 |
| World Surf League | Action sport | Official betting data rights partner |
| Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship | Combat sport | Official betting data rights partner |
| Anchor Line Sports (swimming) | Olympic category sport | Exclusive global deal announced July 14, first bridge into an Olympic federation sport |
Every prior deal sat inside the same lane: alternative and action sports with passionate but underserved fanbases. Swimming is the first genuinely Olympic-governed sport in that portfolio. ALT Sports Data already activates fan communities that legacy operators overlook, and its odds already reach FanDuel, DraftKings and bet365, according to the companies’ own announcements.
The Fire That Pushed Gary Hall Jr. All In
Hall’s own story sits underneath the launch. He lost his home and his swim school business in the Palisades Fire in January 2025. The fire also destroyed his ten Olympic medals. The International Olympic Committee replaced them in a special ceremony at its Lausanne, Switzerland headquarters in May 2025.
Hall has cast the new venture as the payoff for that year. “If successful, this will be my legacy contribution back to the sport and Olympic movement that shaped my life,” he said. “It’s taken everything I have, every favor earned, and the resilient character forged by Olympic competition to get Anchor Line Sports to launch. This is my all-in.”
It is a fitting phrase for a man building a betting company from scratch. Anchor Line Sports describes itself as a centralized hub offering official event data, performance analytics, integrity monitoring and market infrastructure to Olympic federations that have never had access to any of it.
A $12 Billion Market Hiding in Plain Sight
Hall’s $12 billion figure is not far off the record keepers. The IOC’s own accounting put Paris 2024 betting turnover at roughly 11 billion euros, a jump of more than 20 percent from Tokyo 2021 and more than 50 percent from Rio 2016. All of that volume moved through informal and offshore channels rather than any dedicated swimming market.
Todd Ballard, President and Chief Growth Officer of ALT Sports Data, made the technical case for why swimming fits a betting product better than most sports realize. Splits and rivalries give oddsmakers exactly what they need:
- Splits measured in hundredths of a second
- Head-to-head rivalries between individual swimmers and countries
- Relay formats that stack a team dimension on top of individual times
- Back-to-back finals across multiple strokes in a single session
“We are bringing a world-class betting product to a category that has never had one,” Ballard said. The timing is deliberate. USA Swimming Nationals doubles as the selection meet for the national team, and the Pan Pacific Championships two weeks later pit the United States against Australia in an escalating rivalry, all of it staged in the same Southern California pool ahead of the LA28 Olympics.
Why Are Swimmers the Ones Absorbing the Risk?
Because betting markets built on individual performance data have already produced measurable harassment of individual athletes in other sports, and swimming shares that exact structure. NCAA research from two separate surveys shows bettors target athletes whose names are directly tied to a number, not just teams whose final score decides the bet.
An NCAA-commissioned study released in January 2025 found men’s tennis, an individual, stats-driven sport much like swimming, posted one of the highest harassment rates the association had measured: 21 percent of Division I men’s tennis players reported harassment from bettors, edging out men’s basketball’s 17 percent in that same survey. A newer NCAA study, its SNAP survey of 6,800 Division I athletes taken between September 30 and October 5, 2025, found 36 percent of men’s basketball players reported social media abuse tied to betting, with 29 percent saying they’d interacted with a student who bet on their team. Across all Division I men’s sports, 7 percent said they’d received negative or threatening messages from bettors in the past year.
A separate NCAA-backed survey published in March 2026 found even more DI basketball players, 48 percent, said they had faced online, verbal or physical abuse from bettors, with nearly one in five saying it made them enjoy their sport less.
States and gaming operators that continue to offer these bets are putting student-athletes and competition integrity at risk. The NCAA runs the largest integrity monitoring program in the country, and we educate hundreds of thousands of student-athletes about the damages of sports betting, but regulators, lawmakers and gaming operators can and should do more.
NCAA President Charlie Baker said that in a statement accompanying the November 2025 findings. Many of the swimmers racing at U.S. Nationals this month are also NCAA student-athletes, the exact population that research describes.
Swimming Already Polices Doping. Not This.
World Aquatics, the sport’s global governing body, is not starting from zero on integrity. Its Integrity Code, in effect since June 2025, sets standards meant to prohibit conduct that undermines confidence in competition outcomes, and the federation runs an Athlete Safeguarding Council to oversee harassment and abuse protections. The IOC has also run a Joint Integrity Unit with French betting regulator ANJ since the Paris Games, building on event monitoring that dates back to London 2012.
None of that framework was built with a specific bettor-driven social media harassment problem in mind. It targets match manipulation, doping and general athlete abuse. NCAA’s response to bettor harassment, including a data-sharing partnership with social monitoring firm Signify and a multi-year campaign to ban college player prop bets, is a newer and narrower playbook that swimming’s international federations have not had reason to build yet.
What We Know
- Beta testing runs July 28 to August 1 at the U.S. National Championships in Irvine.
- Public-facing odds are scheduled to go live August 12 to 15 at the Pan Pacific Championships, also in Irvine.
- ALT Sports Data’s existing distribution already reaches FanDuel, DraftKings and bet365.
- Anchor Line Sports plans to expand beyond swimming to other Olympic-category sports before the LA28 Games.
What’s Unconfirmed
- Which sportsbook operators will actually list a swimming market first.
- Whether any athlete compensation or consent structure exists for the performance data being sold.
- Whether other Olympic federations beyond swimming will sign on, or when.
- Whether integrity monitoring will extend to bettor harassment specifically, not just doping and match-fixing.
The One State Where the Betting Stays Illegal
Here is the twist Anchor Line Sports can’t data-feed its way around. Both launch events sit in Irvine, California, and California still has no legal, regulated sportsbook. Voters rejected two competing sports betting propositions in November 2022, one backed by tribal casinos, the other by online operators including DraftKings and FanDuel, and neither has come close to returning to the ballot since. Tribal leaders now see 2028 as the earliest realistic window, according to recent betting-industry reporting.
That means the swimmers generating the odds, and the fans in the stands watching them race, will be sitting in the one state where none of them can legally place the bet Anchor Line Sports is building. The wagering itself will happen everywhere else, through operators outside California who take ALT Sports Data’s feed.
The tension between betting money and sports funding is not new elsewhere in global sport. Former Ireland international Niall Quinn has blasted how Ireland splits its football betting tax revenue among sports, arguing smaller federations lose out even as betting operators profit off their events. Swimming, a sport that has long struggled for sponsorship dollars next to football and basketball, is now betting that access to wagering markets solves that exact problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can bettors in the U.S. legally wager on Olympic swimming right now?
Not everywhere, and not yet in the state hosting the launch. Sports betting is illegal in California, where both the beta test and the public rollout are taking place. Bettors in states with regulated sportsbooks, where operators choose to list a swimming market, would be the first with legal access.
Does Gary Hall Jr.’s company set the betting odds itself?
No. Anchor Line Sports supplies official event data, performance analytics and integrity monitoring. ALT Sports Data is the exclusive distribution partner that turns that data into real-time odds and pricing for licensed sportsbook operators, who ultimately set the lines bettors see.
Which Olympic sports could get betting markets next?
Anchor Line Sports has said it plans to expand beyond swimming into other Olympic-category sports in the lead-up to the 2028 Los Angeles Games, though no specific next sport has been named publicly.
Are NCAA swimmers protected from being bet on?
Not directly. NCAA rules bar student-athletes from betting on any sport at any level themselves, but they do not stop outside bettors from wagering on those athletes’ performances, which is the exact dynamic behind the harassment data the NCAA has published.
Anchor Line Sports goes live at the Pan Pacific Championships on August 12. Whatever odds appear that week will be the first real test of whether swimming can carry a betting market, and whether the swimmers generating it get any say in what comes next.
