Just not long ago Ubitennis featured an article about the latest on match fixing in the professional tennis arena, now it has come to light that the tennis umpires themselves are in on the corruption as well! Numerous umpires from various countries have now been exposed to have been involved in match betting outcomes. Perhaps most interesting, the umpires involved were banned in secrecy.
The bans apply to umpires from Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine. In some cases, the umpire has received a lifetime ban. One such ban is for Kirill Parfenov, who actually contacted a fellow colleague via Facebook to carry out the scam. On the other hand, Crotia’s Denis Pitner was found to be logging on to a betting account involving tennis matches. He’s only serving a suspension ending this August it seems.
So how does this exactly work? Since 2012 ITF partnered with Sportradar to provide live updated match scores as a tennis match unfolded. As it turns out, the umpires were intentionally waiting before entering in the live scores on their tablet provided for this purpose, thus allowing the gambling community to take advantage of this delay to make ‘informed’ bets. In the gambling world this is known as ‘courtsiding’. In some cases apparently, the umpire was even texting the scores to the gamblers directly!
What’s more troubling to this author however, is the fact that the ITF, and ATP at large have been carrying out these bans mostly in secrecy. It’s almost as if they had known about this for quite some time now, and are now no longer able to maintain the cover up as news have leaked out. Furthermore, this latest revelation shows that the ITF is not as transparent as it claims to be. On behalf of all tennis fans around the globe, I would like to echo Andy Murray’s statement that “as a player, you just want to be made aware of everything that’s going on. I think we deserve to know everything that’s out there”. The same applies to us watching at home or courtside, where we deserve fair play and honest outcomes.
Thank you to Sean Ingle at The Guardian newspaper for the source of this article.
