OMG! Shocking! How many hours we've watched Wimbledon with bated breath and suspended animation! Oh, what a 'racket' they made!
The Tennis Racket
Betting worth billions. Elite players. Violent threats. Covert messages with Sicilian gamblers. And suspicious matches at Wimbledon. Leaked files expose match-fixing evidence that tennis authorities have kept secret for years.
Heidi Blake UK Investigations Editor, UK
John Templon BuzzFeed News Reporter
Secret files exposing evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News and the BBC.
The sport’s governing bodies have been warned repeatedly about a core group of 16 players – all of whom have ranked in the top 50 – but none have faced any sanctions and more than half of them will begin playing at the Australian Open on Monday.
It has been seven years since world tennis authorities were first handed compelling evidence about a network of players suspected of fixing matches at major tournaments including Wimbledon following a landmark investigation, but all of them have been allowed to continue playing.
The investigation into men’s tennis by BuzzFeed News and the BBC is based on a cache of leaked documents from inside the sport – the Fixing Files – as well as an original analysis of the betting activity on 26,000 matches and interviews across three continents with gambling and match-fixing experts, tennis officials, and players.
The files contain detailed evidence of suspected match-fixing orchestrated by gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy, which was uncovered in the landmark 2008 probe, and which authorities subsequently shelved. “They could have got rid of a network of players that would have almost completely cleared the sport up,” said Mark Phillips, one of the investigators. “We gave them everything tied up with a nice pink bow on top and they took no action at all.”
BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years. It identified 15 players who regularly lost matches in which heavily lopsided betting appeared to substantially shift the odds – a red flag for possible match-fixing.
Four players showed particularly unusual patterns, losing almost all of these red-flag matches. Given the bookmakers’ initial odds, the chances that the players would perform that badly were less than 1 in 1,000. (Read more about the analysis here.)
Tennis is the latest sport to be caught up in allegations of corruption following the scandals that have engulfed world football and athletics.
It can today be revealed:
The 2008 probe was triggered by a notorious match between the world number four, Nikolay Davydenko, a Russian, and the Argentine player Martin Vassallo Arguello, which attracted millions of pounds’ worth of highly suspicious betting triggered by accounts in Moscow.
The tennis authorities announced at the end of the investigation that they had found no evidence of rule-breaking by Vassallo Arguello or Davydenko. But the files reveal that Vassallo Arguello had exchanged 82 text messages at a previous tournament with the suspected ringleader of an Italian gambling syndicate that made hundreds of thousands of pounds betting on his other matches. Inquiries into the Russian gamblers who placed suspicious bets on Davydenko stalled when one threatened violence. These Italian and Russian gambling syndicates and another in Sicily were found to have placed suspicious bets on 72 matches involving the 28 players that the investigators flagged to the authorities.
Weeks after tennis authorities were handed the evidence, Bill Babcock, the head of the International Tennis Federation’s Grand Slam committee, declared that tennis was “healthy” and there was no corruption inside the sport. But the Fixing Files show that allegations of widespread corruption have continued to pour into the integrity unit in the years since.
The whistleblowers from inside world tennis who handed over the Fixing Files have asked to remain anonymous. But Phillips and two other investigators who conducted the probe said the evidence they found was “as strong as any evidence we’ve had” and the authorities “did nothing”.
In all, more than 20 gambling industry officials, international police detectives, and sports integrity experts told BuzzFeed News that world tennis is failing to confront a serious problem with match-fixing. BuzzFeed News and the BBC have chosen not to name the players whose matches have repeatedly been flagged for attracting highly suspicious betting, because without access to phone, bank, or computer records it is not possible to prove a link between the players and the gamblers. The integrity unit has the power to demand all that evidence from any tennis professional, yet many of the individuals whose activity attracted the most serious concern are still playing at a high level. Meanwhile, tennis has grown to a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon.
Today the secret evidence of corruption at the heart of the “gentlemen’s game” can be laid bare for the first time.
Peter Andrews / Reuters
Czarek Sokolowski / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nikolay Davydenko of Russia (left) in the 2 August 2007 match against Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina (right) at the Orange Prokom Open ATP tennis tournament in Sopot, Poland.
ID: 7783601
In pristine whites, Nikolay Davydenko looked in typically commanding form as he stepped out onto the clay court in Sopot, Poland, to defend his title as reigning champion of the Orange Prokom tournament. It ought to have been an easy victory: Davydenko was the world’s fourth-best tennis player, while his Argentine opponent, Martin Vassallo Arguello, languished far below him at number 87 in the rankings.
The wiry Russian played all his usual penetrating groundstrokes to win the first set and swiftly broke his opponent’s serve in the second. To the fans enjoying Polish kabanos sausages in the stands, play seemed to be progressing exactly as anyone would have expected.
But before the first ball had even been struck at the match on 2 August 2007, warning lights had begun flashing on the monitoring systems at the Betfair gambling exchange in London. Hundreds of thousands of pounds had begun flooding into the market that morning, backing Vassallo Arguello to win. By any objective measure Davydenko was the near-certain victor, but the amount of money stacking up against him was so significant that the odds had tipped to make his opponent the favourite to win.
Even after play began and Davydenko went a set and a break up, still greater sums of money continued crashing in against him. In total, £3.6 million was wagered on the game – more than 10 times the usual volume of cash for a tournament at that level – and much of the money being bet against the Russian was coming in from nine linked accounts registered to users in Moscow. Everything in the rankings and the way play was progressing on court pointed towards a resounding victory for Davydenko, and yet the Russian account holders seemed sure he would lose. What did they know that the bookmakers didn’t?
View this image ›
Davydenko (right) receives treatment on his foot during his second-round match with Vassallo Arguello at the Prokom Open, 2 August 2007. Czarek Sokolowski / ASSOCIATED PRESS
ID: 7783612
View this image ›
Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783605
Betfair and other bookmakers had been warning the ATP of the threat of gambling corruption in tennis for several years before the situation came to a head in Sopot. “This was something that we had been watching build,” recalled Betfair’s co-founder Mark Davies.
Bosses at the betting exchange felt they had to protect honest bettors who could lose huge sums of money if corrupt gamblers were rigging the market. Crisis talks were convened in London.
Six or seven players, including Davydenko and Vassallo Arguello, had repeatedly attracted suspicious betting activity, Davies recalled, and the management committee decided to take a drastic step: They would suspend all bets on those players.
The ATP’s own Richard Ings, who served as the association’s executive vice president for rules and competition until 2005, had compiled a list of 20 players who had been implicated in suspicious matches flagged by bookmakers – including both Davydenko and Vassallo Arguello. “There were consistently matches across the depth and breadth of men’s pro tennis with extremely suspicious shifts in betting odds,” Ings told BuzzFeed News and the BBC. “What became very clear is that, whilst there were lots of matches with suspicious betting patterns, you tended to see the names of the same players cropping up again and again.”
Players were widely rumoured to be “tanking” – deliberately forfeiting matches by not giving their best efforts – when they were tired or carrying minor injuries and wanted to preserve their energy for more important tournaments. Sometimes, it was said, players would carve up the spoils of victory: One would deliberately lose but get to keep the prize money, while the other would win and bag the coveted ranking points. Now, however, the ballooning phenomenon of online gambling meant billions of pounds were being bet each year on tennis, and a tip about a player’s intention to tank a match could yield vast winnings. Prize money at lesser tournaments can be paltry, and a year on the tennis tour can set a player back more than £100,000, making it tempting to cash in on the occasional fix.
Ings recalled that he had talked to a “great many players” about the problem and it became clear that fixing was “a regular thing within the sport”. He said five or so players told him they had been approached and offered sums “in the vicinity of fifty-thousand U.S. dollars to throw a first-round match at a middle-level ATP tournament”.
He began to realise that tennis was particularly vulnerable to corruption because tens of thousands of matches are played each year, with billions of pounds at stake on the gambling markets, and it only took one player to fix the outcome. “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.”
Ings had wanted to find out why the same names kept cropping up in bookmakers’ reports of suspicious matches, but at that time officials lacked the power to investigate further. “Identifying whether someone has fixed a match is incredibly difficult without betting records, without access to telephone records, without access to financial transactions,” he said. So Ings introduced a new anti-corruption code that compelled players to hand over their phone and bank records to the ATP if they were suspected of fixing matches. Those powers were to be crucial in investigating the match in Sopot.
View this image ›
Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783606
A team of former detectives and betting investigators from the British Horseracing Authority – whose integrity unit was considered the gold standard in world sport – were recruited by the ATP to get to the bottom of the Sopot mystery. They set up a temporary office on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s theatre district, where they were led by Paul Scotney, the horseracing authority’s integrity director; Paul Beeby, its head of intelligence; and Phillips, its top betting investigator.
Scotney and Beeby were a pair of veteran organised crime detectives who in retirement had turned their hand to policing gambling corruption. “When you go to a murder scene and there’s a body, you know someone’s dead,” Scotney told BuzzFeed News. “On some betting markets you know there’s a body, and the Davydenko match was one of those. The odds just did not match with their rankings at all, and the amount of money that had gone into Betfair was totally disproportionate.”
While his colleagues set about preparing to interview the players and their entourages, Phillips was tasked with analysing the gambling data. He quickly found that about a fifth of the £3.6 million traded on the Betfair exchange had flooded in from a network of nine Moscow accounts, which were accessed from the same group of computers. “This strongly suggests that either all accounts were being controlled by one person or that the account holders were ‘working’ together,” Phillips noted in his formal statement to the ATP.
View this image ›
BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783611
Read more at:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-racket/
The Tennis Racket
Betting worth billions. Elite players. Violent threats. Covert messages with Sicilian gamblers. And suspicious matches at Wimbledon. Leaked files expose match-fixing evidence that tennis authorities have kept secret for years.
Heidi Blake UK Investigations Editor, UK John Templon BuzzFeed News ReporterSecret files exposing evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News and the BBC.
The sport’s governing bodies have been warned repeatedly about a core group of 16 players – all of whom have ranked in the top 50 – but none have faced any sanctions and more than half of them will begin playing at the Australian Open on Monday.
It has been seven years since world tennis authorities were first handed compelling evidence about a network of players suspected of fixing matches at major tournaments including Wimbledon following a landmark investigation, but all of them have been allowed to continue playing.
The investigation into men’s tennis by BuzzFeed News and the BBC is based on a cache of leaked documents from inside the sport – the Fixing Files – as well as an original analysis of the betting activity on 26,000 matches and interviews across three continents with gambling and match-fixing experts, tennis officials, and players.
The files contain detailed evidence of suspected match-fixing orchestrated by gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy, which was uncovered in the landmark 2008 probe, and which authorities subsequently shelved. “They could have got rid of a network of players that would have almost completely cleared the sport up,” said Mark Phillips, one of the investigators. “We gave them everything tied up with a nice pink bow on top and they took no action at all.”
BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years. It identified 15 players who regularly lost matches in which heavily lopsided betting appeared to substantially shift the odds – a red flag for possible match-fixing.
Four players showed particularly unusual patterns, losing almost all of these red-flag matches. Given the bookmakers’ initial odds, the chances that the players would perform that badly were less than 1 in 1,000. (Read more about the analysis here.)
Tennis is the latest sport to be caught up in allegations of corruption following the scandals that have engulfed world football and athletics.
It can today be revealed:
- Winners of singles and doubles titles at Grand Slam tournaments are among the core group of 16 players who have repeatedly been reported for losing games when highly suspicious bets have been placed against them.
- One top-50 player competing in the Australian Open is suspected of repeatedly fixing his first set.
- Players are being targeted in hotel rooms at major tournaments and offered $50,000 or more per fix by corrupt gamblers.
- Gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy have made hundreds of thousands of pounds placing highly suspicious bets on scores of matches – including at Wimbledon and the French Open.
- The names of more than 70 players appear on nine leaked lists of suspected fixers who have been flagged up to the tennis authorities over the past decade without being sanctioned.
Players are being targeted in hotel rooms at major tournaments and offered $50,000 or more per fix by corrupt gamblers.
ID: 7783665The 2008 probe was triggered by a notorious match between the world number four, Nikolay Davydenko, a Russian, and the Argentine player Martin Vassallo Arguello, which attracted millions of pounds’ worth of highly suspicious betting triggered by accounts in Moscow.
The tennis authorities announced at the end of the investigation that they had found no evidence of rule-breaking by Vassallo Arguello or Davydenko. But the files reveal that Vassallo Arguello had exchanged 82 text messages at a previous tournament with the suspected ringleader of an Italian gambling syndicate that made hundreds of thousands of pounds betting on his other matches. Inquiries into the Russian gamblers who placed suspicious bets on Davydenko stalled when one threatened violence. These Italian and Russian gambling syndicates and another in Sicily were found to have placed suspicious bets on 72 matches involving the 28 players that the investigators flagged to the authorities.
Weeks after tennis authorities were handed the evidence, Bill Babcock, the head of the International Tennis Federation’s Grand Slam committee, declared that tennis was “healthy” and there was no corruption inside the sport. But the Fixing Files show that allegations of widespread corruption have continued to pour into the integrity unit in the years since.
The whistleblowers from inside world tennis who handed over the Fixing Files have asked to remain anonymous. But Phillips and two other investigators who conducted the probe said the evidence they found was “as strong as any evidence we’ve had” and the authorities “did nothing”.
In all, more than 20 gambling industry officials, international police detectives, and sports integrity experts told BuzzFeed News that world tennis is failing to confront a serious problem with match-fixing. BuzzFeed News and the BBC have chosen not to name the players whose matches have repeatedly been flagged for attracting highly suspicious betting, because without access to phone, bank, or computer records it is not possible to prove a link between the players and the gamblers. The integrity unit has the power to demand all that evidence from any tennis professional, yet many of the individuals whose activity attracted the most serious concern are still playing at a high level. Meanwhile, tennis has grown to a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon.
Today the secret evidence of corruption at the heart of the “gentlemen’s game” can be laid bare for the first time.
Peter Andrews / Reuters
Czarek Sokolowski / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nikolay Davydenko of Russia (left) in the 2 August 2007 match against Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina (right) at the Orange Prokom Open ATP tennis tournament in Sopot, Poland.
ID: 7783601
In pristine whites, Nikolay Davydenko looked in typically commanding form as he stepped out onto the clay court in Sopot, Poland, to defend his title as reigning champion of the Orange Prokom tournament. It ought to have been an easy victory: Davydenko was the world’s fourth-best tennis player, while his Argentine opponent, Martin Vassallo Arguello, languished far below him at number 87 in the rankings.
The wiry Russian played all his usual penetrating groundstrokes to win the first set and swiftly broke his opponent’s serve in the second. To the fans enjoying Polish kabanos sausages in the stands, play seemed to be progressing exactly as anyone would have expected.
But before the first ball had even been struck at the match on 2 August 2007, warning lights had begun flashing on the monitoring systems at the Betfair gambling exchange in London. Hundreds of thousands of pounds had begun flooding into the market that morning, backing Vassallo Arguello to win. By any objective measure Davydenko was the near-certain victor, but the amount of money stacking up against him was so significant that the odds had tipped to make his opponent the favourite to win.
Even after play began and Davydenko went a set and a break up, still greater sums of money continued crashing in against him. In total, £3.6 million was wagered on the game – more than 10 times the usual volume of cash for a tournament at that level – and much of the money being bet against the Russian was coming in from nine linked accounts registered to users in Moscow. Everything in the rankings and the way play was progressing on court pointed towards a resounding victory for Davydenko, and yet the Russian account holders seemed sure he would lose. What did they know that the bookmakers didn’t?
View this image ›
Davydenko (right) receives treatment on his foot during his second-round match with Vassallo Arguello at the Prokom Open, 2 August 2007. Czarek Sokolowski / ASSOCIATED PRESS
ID: 7783612
View this image ›
Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783605
Betfair and other bookmakers had been warning the ATP of the threat of gambling corruption in tennis for several years before the situation came to a head in Sopot. “This was something that we had been watching build,” recalled Betfair’s co-founder Mark Davies.
Bosses at the betting exchange felt they had to protect honest bettors who could lose huge sums of money if corrupt gamblers were rigging the market. Crisis talks were convened in London.
Six or seven players, including Davydenko and Vassallo Arguello, had repeatedly attracted suspicious betting activity, Davies recalled, and the management committee decided to take a drastic step: They would suspend all bets on those players.
The ATP’s own Richard Ings, who served as the association’s executive vice president for rules and competition until 2005, had compiled a list of 20 players who had been implicated in suspicious matches flagged by bookmakers – including both Davydenko and Vassallo Arguello. “There were consistently matches across the depth and breadth of men’s pro tennis with extremely suspicious shifts in betting odds,” Ings told BuzzFeed News and the BBC. “What became very clear is that, whilst there were lots of matches with suspicious betting patterns, you tended to see the names of the same players cropping up again and again.”
Players were widely rumoured to be “tanking” – deliberately forfeiting matches by not giving their best efforts – when they were tired or carrying minor injuries and wanted to preserve their energy for more important tournaments. Sometimes, it was said, players would carve up the spoils of victory: One would deliberately lose but get to keep the prize money, while the other would win and bag the coveted ranking points. Now, however, the ballooning phenomenon of online gambling meant billions of pounds were being bet each year on tennis, and a tip about a player’s intention to tank a match could yield vast winnings. Prize money at lesser tournaments can be paltry, and a year on the tennis tour can set a player back more than £100,000, making it tempting to cash in on the occasional fix.
“If you were to invent a sport that was tailor-made for match-fixing, the sport that you would invent would be called tennis.”
ID: 7783669Ings recalled that he had talked to a “great many players” about the problem and it became clear that fixing was “a regular thing within the sport”. He said five or so players told him they had been approached and offered sums “in the vicinity of fifty-thousand U.S. dollars to throw a first-round match at a middle-level ATP tournament”.
He began to realise that tennis was particularly vulnerable to corruption because tens of thousands of matches are played each year, with billions of pounds at stake on the gambling markets, and it only took one player to fix the outcome. “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.”
Ings had wanted to find out why the same names kept cropping up in bookmakers’ reports of suspicious matches, but at that time officials lacked the power to investigate further. “Identifying whether someone has fixed a match is incredibly difficult without betting records, without access to telephone records, without access to financial transactions,” he said. So Ings introduced a new anti-corruption code that compelled players to hand over their phone and bank records to the ATP if they were suspected of fixing matches. Those powers were to be crucial in investigating the match in Sopot.
View this image ›
Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783606
A team of former detectives and betting investigators from the British Horseracing Authority – whose integrity unit was considered the gold standard in world sport – were recruited by the ATP to get to the bottom of the Sopot mystery. They set up a temporary office on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s theatre district, where they were led by Paul Scotney, the horseracing authority’s integrity director; Paul Beeby, its head of intelligence; and Phillips, its top betting investigator.
Scotney and Beeby were a pair of veteran organised crime detectives who in retirement had turned their hand to policing gambling corruption. “When you go to a murder scene and there’s a body, you know someone’s dead,” Scotney told BuzzFeed News. “On some betting markets you know there’s a body, and the Davydenko match was one of those. The odds just did not match with their rankings at all, and the amount of money that had gone into Betfair was totally disproportionate.”
While his colleagues set about preparing to interview the players and their entourages, Phillips was tasked with analysing the gambling data. He quickly found that about a fifth of the £3.6 million traded on the Betfair exchange had flooded in from a network of nine Moscow accounts, which were accessed from the same group of computers. “This strongly suggests that either all accounts were being controlled by one person or that the account holders were ‘working’ together,” Phillips noted in his formal statement to the ATP.
View this image ›
BuzzFeed News
ID: 7783611
Read more at:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-racket/
