How do the tours, the Slams and the ITF stop a faceless gambler who is willing to walk into a hotel lobby near some godforsaken, far away tournament, offer a player who is down on his luck $50,000 to throw a match in an event where he is likely to win no more than $10,000 and his loss won’t count against his ranking?
Moreover, how do the sport’s leading bodies stop gamblers from calling, e-mailing of texting players, coaches or trainers from afar, when technology has become so advanced and that anyone can place a bet on any match on any given day over the Internet?
They probably can’t do much when it comes to stopping gamblers offering bribes, but after dropping the ball for at least four years, they can muster their considerable muscle and develop fearsome new rules that will allow them to throw down the lifetime ban hammer on players, coaches, trainers or anyone else who works in the sport. Much of their success depends on their ferocity and the integrity of the players and their camps, because with no access to individual bank records and the inability to police the players’ every interaction, it’s seems like a daunting task.
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Turning a Blind Eye
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A spokesperson for Bookmaker William Hill told the AP that people would always find a way to fix matches, despite new rules currently being put in place. Spokesman Graham Sharpe said, “Whatever rule you have in place, they’ll find a way around it.”
Without question, tennis’ gambling scandal seems to have hit new heights, with player after player coming out and saying that they’ve been approached, and betting agencies revealing that approximately 140 ATP matches have been considered suspect over the past five years.
The ATP, WTA, ITF and the Grand Slam committee met in London to discuss the creation of a combined integrity unit and issued the following statement: “While we do not believe that our sport has a corruption problem, we do recognize that a threat to the integrity of tennis exists. We believe that an independent situation analysis of this risk is necessary and intend to utilize external expertise to assist us in conducting this analysis.”
Full-time experts will likely be hired in the near future and there will be a lot of bluster, but the fact is, the ATP was slow to interrogate Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassalo Arguello, who are in the epicenter of the recent scandal, and no player has been suspended yet. It seems like the tours have been turning a blind eye to the problem for quite some time.
Stories began popping up as early as ‘03, when the Sunday Telegraph claimed: “Top international tennis players are deliberately throwing matches for financial gain. It is believed that bets of up to $160,000 have been placed by players, through their coaches and other intermediaries, with internet betting exchanges, resulting in massive payouts...The ATP was first made aware of the concerns of betting more than three months ago. Most of the players under suspicion are outside the top 100. However the ATP took the unprecedented step of warning a former world top 10-ranked player against not trying after it was brought to their attention that there had been heavy, irregular betting on one of his matches, in which he lost in straight sets...The sport has long been aware of the lesser problem of ‘tanking,’ whereby players deliberately lose matches, more often than not for relatively innocent reasons, like the need to move on to another tournament where they are contracted to play. Two weeks ago, Georgian Irakli Labadze was fined $7,500 for not trying. But deliberately losing matches for personal financial gain is a disturbing new phenomenon within the sport. Even Wimbledon has not been spared the embarrassment of dodgy results. Betting on one match at this year’s Championships, involving a high-profile player was halted when bookmakers became aware that the coach of one of the players was placing bets. An ATP trainer even offered his services to one bookmaker, promising to alert them to news of injured players, which would be in contravention of ATP rules.”
Various reports continued to fly around in the following years, but it wasn’t until this past summer, when Betfair suspended wagering after $10 million was placed on Davydenko and Vassalo Arguello in an obscure tournament in Sopot, Poland, that the dam broke and betting agencies began to release information matches that they were suspicious of including:
Fernando Vincente vs. former No. 1 Yevgeny Kafelnikov back in ‘03 ; Jarrko Nieminen vs. Feliciano Lopez in ‘03; and Sargis Sargisian vs. Davydenko at ‘05 Gstaad, when large wages were placed on Sargisian to win and two bookmakers voided bets on the match after Davydenko retired after the first game of the second set — just enough to comply with the ‘one set must be completed’ rule. Then there was a Wimbledon contest between Richard Bloomfield and Carlos Berloq, where a remarkable $680,000 wagered on the British No 7 to win.
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In ‘06, a number of matches came under suspicion, including Vassallo Arguello against Juan-Pablo Guzman in Palermo, when there was massive betting fluctuation. Guzman won the first set, and with the score at 6-2, 2-0, huge amounts of money came in against him, suggesting an expectation that he’d lose the second set. He did and Vassallo-Arguello ended up winning 2-6, 6-3, 7-5. Vassallo Arguello was also involved in two other suspect matches that fall.
But it was the Davydenko-Arguello Sopot affair that has grabbed the most attention.
Said a Betfair spokesman: “The prices seemed very odd. “Davydenko started off as a 1/2 shot, which means if you put down a pound on him, you’d win 20 pence. He went on to win the first set. And yet, a set up, if you’d put a pound on him, you would have won £4.30 pounds, clearly a lot more than when he was level at the start. That seemed to us to be very odd... There’s something not right in that market.”
Of the 140 suspicious matches on the men’s side, five of Davydenko performances have come up, nine of Vassallo Arguello’s, 11 of Filippo Volandri’s, eight of Sergio Roitman’s and seven of Mariano Puerta’s, who was suspended for doping.
Not surprisingly, all the players who’ve said they were approached by gamblers — Dmitry Tursunov, Janko Tipsarevic, Jarrko Nieminen, Thomas Johansson, Arvind Parmar, Gilles Elseneer, Dick Norman, Michael Llodra, Paul Goldstein — said they turned offers down.
But, incredibly, the ATP has only launched one investigation — of Davydenko and Vasello Arguello, even though Gilles Elseneer told a Belgian newspaper that soon after he qualified for Wimbledon two years ago, he was approached “bluntly into my face” in the locker room (which means the person would have to have a credential) and was told that he could make a hundred times more than his first-round winner’s check for giving up the match. “Think about it and give us an answer tomorrow,” he was told. “I had my honor as a player to protect and Wimbledon meant everything to me. They said I should take my time and give them my reply the next day, but I only needed a couple of minutes to realize it was impossible for me to contemplate.” He won the match in straight sets.
In October, Andy Murray became just the third player the ATP Tour planned to officially talk to after the Scot re-ignited the flames after he said, “Everyone knows it goes on.” He had to later clarify his comments, explaining that the “it” meant players being approached to throw matches, and the amount of betting in tennis, not tanking or match fixing.
But Rafael Nadal went after Murray: “He’s gone overboard, I don’t think anything like that happens. I doubt very much that he knows more than anyone else. I think that everyone gives it 100 percent and that there are no fixed games.”
Roger Federer added: “I’m surprised by all of these stories, shocked really that this might be happening. I’ve been around for the last 10 years and have never been approached or ever heard anything about it until these comments came out.”
Mardy Fish told IT: “ You hear rumors of guys on tour in the past who are at tournaments, not playing in the tournament, but betting just because they want to watch a match, but not knowing whether someone will tank or going up to one of the players and saying, ‘I’m going to give you this if you lose.’ I’ve never seen that. You used to hear about it, but that’s it. I’ve never been approached, I never heard of anyone who has been approached. You hate to see when someone like Murray says that. It’s bad for the sport.”
Remarkably, Davydenko rather creatively went after Murray:
“If Murray says that he knows, that means that he gambles himself. Because people who start talking out loud have their fears disappear. And they know that if they speak out loud it means that they are free, they have not done it.”
The women have been largely left out the scandal. During the summer, numerous top players were asked if they had been approached by gamblers, and none said they had. Elena Dementieva theorized when she said that gamblers know better than to approach women, “because women always hate to lose.”
But then in the fall, reports surfaced about a suspicious quarterfinal between the unknown Tatiana Poutchek and obscure Mariya Koryttseva in Calcutta, a contest that even the most wonkish expert would have a hard time calling, where an incredible $1.5-million was wagered. Betfair suspended betting on the match but eventually did pay out.
WTA CEO Larry Scott told The L.A. Times that he knew of two matches on the tour this year that were marked by suspicious betting patterns and that one is considered closed, while the Poutchek-Koryttseva is still be investigated.
“ I’m very confident women’s tennis does not have a serious problem,” he said.
The Australian Open thinks the problem is serious enough to batten down the hatches and decided that it will no longer allow bookmakers on site and will also use a specialist security firm to enforce zero tolerance of illegal gambling and match fixing.
Perhaps if all the players took on the attitude of British journeyman Arvind Parmar, the problem would simply go away. But that may be wishful thinking.
“A guy I’d never seen before just walked up and asked me to throw a match,” Parmar told the Times of London. “He said because it was in my control, I should lose in straight sets and I’d receive X amount. I don’t want to say how much except it was pretty substantial. It took me half a second to say no.
“To be honest, I wanted to punch him in the face. I told him to get the hell out of here. Tennis was my life and I had my integrity and that of the sport to protect.”
