Largely, however, when we hear about it in the mainstream media, it's often individual players who've been caught and prosecuted or banned by the tennis authorities, etc.
Well, the BBC and BuzzFeed News have reported in this ESPN article at the start of play in the first Grand Slam event of 2016 that the entire top of the sport is tainted. A report will be aired in Great Britain on Tuesday night on these findings.
A seven-year investigation by a group commissioned by the men's tennis sanctioning body is the effective end of the relevant belief that the sport is (or can be!) on the up and up:
- Over the course of the last ten years, a massive betting syndicate in Europe and Russia has been able to infiltrate the top ranks of world men's tennis.
- The body created to study and enhance integrity in tennis has found, over the last ten years, that matches, even involving Grand Slam winners, Top 50 players, and Grand Slam events (the report directly implicates three Wimbeldon matches) as being suspicious, with the tennis league doing nothing against anyone involved.
- Mark Phillips, one of the investigators contacted, said there were 10 players at the core of the process, routinely fixing matches in a manner which was one of the most blatant schemes in 20 years of Phillips' investigations into betting patterns on matches.
- No names were disclosed, because the BBC and BuzzFeed believed they would need more evidence and probable sanctions, but many of the players still play today, without sanction. Eight are in the men's draw of the just-started 2016 Australian Open.
- Sixteen of those players were ranked in the top 50 at the time of their purported fixed matches. No word on how many of those sixteen were in that main ten-player group.
Why not? The Show Must Go On.
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