But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition.
Sports gambling is diametrically opposed to sport itself.
It’s heinous.
Horse racing. All over the world there are tracks where horses run, and people bet on the horses, but that isn't why they exist. The track's gambling license, something first granted back when the track was built, is now used to facilitate an attached "casino". The horses are cover for the casino and the casino is just cover for the real money makers of the enterprise: an arcade of slot machines. Corruption for sure, but the "sport" of horse racing probably wouldn't have survived absent that corruption.
I don’t know how HN views horse riding, but “no more horse racing” probably would have resulted in a lot less dead and injured horses, so maybe horse-racing should have died out.