Tennis Fraud Squad Debated After Claimed Wimbledon Bribes
Tennis officials throughout the world reportedly are reeling—and thinking about pooling their organizations’ resources to develop a new fraud squad—after claims by several professional players that they have been offered bribes to lose games at Wimbledon.
Yesterday a Belgian player, Gilles Elseneer, said he had been offered about $70,000 pounds to lose a first-round match in 2005. However, he refused and won in straight sets, reports the London Times. Tennis officials are concerned, however, that others may be tempted by the money to be made, according to the newspaper, and are talking about combining the resources of multiple organizations to create a single comprehensive anti-corruption unit. The organizations include the Association of Tennis Professionals and the International Tennis Federation, among others.
Although it was pointed out to Elseneer that the offered $70,000-pound bribe was about 100 times what he would make if he won the first-round match, “I had my honour as a player to protect and Wimbledon meant everything to me,” he said yesterday. “They said I should take my time and give them my reply the next day, but I only needed a couple of minutes to realise it was impossible for me to contemplate.”
“Men’s tennis has a gambling problem,” the Los Angeles Times reported last month. It cited—as did the London Times—suspicious betting patterns. It also noted a French publication’s report that two unnamed players had been offered bribes and seen professional tennis matches lost because of bribes.
