London 2012 may be the most bet-upon Olympic Games in history.

Bookmaker William Hill last month predicted that the betting industry could achieve turnover of as much as £50 million ($81 million/€57 million) from the Games and said it was "optimistic" it would break the £10 million ($16 million/€11 million) turnover barrier for the first time.

Rival Ladbrokes, meanwhile, describes next year's Olympics as "a massive part of our strategy".

It sees the Games in part as a way of "changing people's perceptions" and letting them know that there is more to bookmakers than racing and greyhound racing.

This high level of interest in using the Olympics - wholly legitimately - as a betting medium coincides, however, with warnings from sports authorities, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), of the threat to sport posed by illegal and irregular betting.

The IOC told me they had identified illegal and irregular sports betting as "one of the leading threats to organised sports".

"Although we have yet to detect an instance of illegal or irregular betting at an Olympic Games," the IOC said, "we are not naïve.

"The number of cases in many sports is on the rise and we need to acknowledge the threat and take steps to neutralize it."

One way or another then, betting may well be a rich source of stories at next year's Games.

I certainly don't see anything wrong with legitimate organisations running books on Olympic events.

Indeed, as an occasional punter, it is not impossible that I might avail myself of their services from time to time.

More than that, the more interested leading High Street bookmakers become in the Games as a source of business, the better you would expect them to know the market.

And the better they get to know the market, the more valuable a potential source of intelligence they should become for the authorities.

After all, if someone has rigged a result and is seeking to profit from it, legitimate bookmakers must rank high on the list of potential victims.

An active legal betting market on Olympic events could therefore be a positive boon in the fight against illegal betting activities.

What does strike me as worthy of debate, given the huge sums companies pay for marketing rights enabling them to associate their names with the Games, is whether the betting industry should be required to pay some sort of fee for the right to use Olympic sport as a betting medium.

There is a precedent of sorts in the horseracing levy under which 10.75 percent of UK bookmakers' gross profits derived from UK racing products is taken and put to use for various purposes in the sport.

In the case of the Olympics, the obvious use for money raised from the betting industry via an Olympic levy would be to help fund what seems certain to be a costly fight against illegal and irregular betting.

It will be interesting to see if the high-powered international working group that is currently drafting proposals on how effectively to combat the problem comes up with anything along these lines.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed by clicking here