The world of tennis badly affected by scandal Monday, the first day of the Australian open, amid allegations of widespread match-fixing by top players including Grand Slam winners.
A new report by BuzzFeed and the BBC alleges that tennis authorities were warned about “a core group of 16 players—all of whom have ranked in the top 50” who were implicated in suspicions of match-fixing, “but none have faced any sanctions and more than half of them will begin playing at the Australian Open on Monday.”
Leaked documents provided to the news organizations reveal that the sport’s governing bodies had evidence for years of a network of players involved in manipulating matches, following a major internal investigation in 2008, but no action was ever taken.
“They could have got rid of a network of players that would have almost completely cleared the sport up,” Mark Phillips, a betting analyst who was involved in the 2008 probe, told Buzzfeed. “We gave them everything tied up with a nice pink bow on top and they took no action at all.”
According to the Buzzfeed-BBC report, players were approached in their hotel rooms and offered $50,000 or more to fix matches, in a scheme connected to organized gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy.
An Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) investigation into one particularly high-profile incident, which led back to a betting ring in Moscow, was derailed in part after the detectives received threats of “physical harm.”
The head of the Tennis Integrity Unit, which was established in the wake of the 2008 probe, said that evidence of suspected wrongdoing was shelved because lawyers had advised them that a new integrity code could not be enforced retroactively. Buzzfeed and the BBC chose not name the players implicated in either investigation because of the difficulty of proving the allegations.
World tennis authorities issued a statement Monday from the Australian Open rejecting “any suggestion that evidence of match fixing has been suppressed for any reason,”
CNN reported. But former tennis watchdogs say differently. Richard Ings, the former executive vice president for rules and competition at the ATP, told Buzzfeed that he had a list of 20 players who had been flagged by bookmakers for potentially throwing matches that featured unusual betting patterns. “If you were to invent a sport that was tailor-made for match-fixing, the sport that you would invent would be called tennis,” he said. “It doesn’t take much effort on a player to throw a match without the opponent or the officials or the fans or even the media being aware. Where it does become apparent is in the betting market.”
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