Andrew Phillips, who operates the Jim Elphick Tennis Centre, said the reports that surfaced this week had been “interesting” but not surprising.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, 2014 US Open champion Marin Cilic stated clearly that he had never been approached for match-fixing, or suspected an opponent was involved in corruption and said he doesn’t believe such things existed at the top level in the sport.
On Monday, the TIU’s director of integrity Nigel Willerton said the body’s hands were tied in obtaining evidence because players and their support teams aren’t obliged to hand over, for instance, phone records and emails.
An unnamed former tennis trader for a bookmaking company also told The Times that he suspected matches were fixed “on a regular basis, particularly towards the end of the season” because of irregular movements in the betting odds.
The BBC and Buzzfeed said that during the past decade the sport’s Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) was repeatedly warned about the potential throwing of matches by 10 players ranked in the top 50, but that none ever faced punishment.
“They get hate messages from bettors on Facebook, or they get offers to throw a match”, Lin said. He said: “I’ve been aware of it since I was quite young and I think when people come with big sums of money when you’re at that age, some people can make mistakes”.
“It made me feel awful because I don’t want to be anyhow linked to this kind of…you know, somebody may call it an opportunity”, said the Serbian.
“I can assure you that tennis is not treating this lightly”, ATP chief Chris Kermode told Buzzfeed.
Roger Federer: I would love to hear names.
“I think that tennis is one of the sports where they are being quite serious about it, they have the integrity program which is taking care of it. Whatever player has every been approached there are investigations which are going on, that’s how it is”.
The committee’s hearings could also include the names of players mentioned in leaked documents, the Telegraph reports, but it’s possible those names could be kept private, as has been done before in sporting inquiries, according to The Telegraph.
“How high up does it go?”
“Of course, we threw it away right away”. A British bookmaker received an unusual amount of wagers on the match, a lot of them for Arguello.
Kermode said the TIU had won 18 convictions, including six life bans, since it was set up in 2008, adding that it “has to find evidence as opposed to information, suspicion, or hearsay”. We’ve got to be super aggressive.
Advertisement
ROGER FEDERER has called for players guilty of match fixing to be named and shamed after the first day of the Australian Open was overshadowed by claims of corruption. They are the ones who sweat and put in incredible work into their sport, but, if their performance is looked at with a jaundiced eye, then, it is incredibly unfair to them. In an interview this fall, he said, “My family has supported me for now, but I don’t know how long that can last”.
