Tennis, the menace

ANOTHER professional sport joins the ranks of the corrupted. An investigation by BBC News and online BuzzFeed News has revealed that tennis matches, including some at Wimbledon, may have been fixed, and stars who rank in the top 50, including Grand Slam winners, may have been guilty of the practice.

Such has been the barrage of other recent sporting exposés that the response has been less of surprise than of resignation.

There are differences however between the case of tennis and that of athletics and football.

The alleged illegality does not involve corrupt governing body officials, but massive gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy, which can offer players far more money to throw a match than they might make in an entire tournament. Indeed, thanks to the proliferation of specific online betting markets, a player need only throw one set, or even a few games, to give his or her paymasters the returns they seek.

The head of the Association of Tennis Professionals noted that the reports mainly refer to events from “about 10 years ago”.

That is no cause for complacency: The European Sports Security Association flagged up more than 50 suspicious matches in 2015, and as many as eight of the players implicated in the original scandal are thought to be taking part in the Australian Open this week.

The odds are, as ever, stacked against the regulator. The Tennis Integrity Unit employs a staff of only five and has a presence at between 20 and 30 tournaments a year, and is dependent on tipoffs from betting companies and players.

Yet in the course of its investigations the TIU does have the power to force players to hand over phone, bank and computer records. It should use it now, for all those players under suspicion in the report. Reports claim that players are being targeted in hotel rooms at major tournaments and lured with upwards of £35 000 (R840 000) a fix by corrupt gamblers. Fans, meanwhile, can only mourn another sport that appears to have substituted money for love of the game.