All Bets Are Off? French Federation Sues Bookmakers

The French Open is taking three of the world's biggest bookmakers to court in a legal bid to ban betting firms from taking bets on Roland Garros. The French Tennis Federation filed lawsuits in Paris and Liege, Belgium today against Betfair, Bwin and Ladbrokes seeking an injunction to prevent the companies from accepting online bets for the French Open and requesting a daily fine for violations, according to a published report in the Associated Press.
 
"There is urgency to act because sporting ethic is at risk," Jean-Francois Vilotte, director general of the French Tennis Federation, told The Associated Press. "It is an issue as important as the fight against doping."
 
Vilotte told the AP he monitored the French Tennis Federation-run BNP Paribas Masters in Paris last fall and said total bets for the one-week Paris Indoors were between $750 million and $1.5 billion. The Paris indoors features a 64-player men's singles draw. Since Roland Garros is a 15-day tournament, featuring 128-player men's and women's draws as well as men's and women's doubles and mixed doubles events, Vilotte maintains gambling activity at the clay-court major would be much more extensive.
 
"You can imagine that for Roland Garros, the totals would be much higher," Vilotte told the AP.
 
Jean-Louis Dupont, Vilotte's attorney in the lawsuit, maintains that the recent match-fixing allegations scar the sport and the players in scandal and suspicion while bookmakers emerge relatively unscathed.
 
"They purely scrap the bets on the event in question and by doing that generate a scandal that the organization and players have to deal with," Dupont told the AP. "It can give them a lifelong ugly reputation."
 
Tennis Week is contacting the betting firms in question for comment.
 
In December, the ATP announced it had suspended Italy's Potito Starace and Daniele Bracciali for betting on tennis matches. Neither player bet on their own matches nor were they accused of fixing matches.
 
The then 31st-ranked Starace was suspended for six weeks and fined $30,000 for making five bets on tennis placed two years ago. The bets Starace placed amounted to about $130, according to the Italian Tennis Federation (FIT). Bracciali, 28, was hit with a three-month suspension and fined $20,000 for placing about 50 bets. Bracciali's bets averaged about $7 apiece according to Reuters. Both suspensions start on January 1.
 
"The penalties are out of proportion with the size of infringements committed by the two players," an FIT spokesman told the BBC. "Obviously, neither player betted on their own matches."
 
Branding himself and Starace as "sacrificial lambs", Bracciali suggested the ATP singled out the Italians because they are not big-named champions.
 
"We were the sacrificial lambs. That is why they have got upset with us," Bracciali said in comments published by Reuters. "We are not champions and we are not important at a high level. But I cannot believe that we Italians were the only ones that placed the odd little bet. The regulations of the ATP lend themselves to numerous interpretations of the rule 'not necessary to bet on tennis'. Plus, if I had wanted to be sly, I certainly wouldn't place bets in my own name."
 
While the ATP has vowed to crack down on gambling in the aftermath of suspiciously high betting on Nikolay Davydenko's match against Martin Vassallo Argüello in Sopot, Poland in July.
 
British gambling site Betfair reported it received about $7 million of bets —  10 times the amount of bets it typically receives on a match — on the then 87th-ranked Vassallo Argüello despite the fact the Argentine was ranked 83 spots below the top-seeded Davydenko and had won just four of his prior 10 matches. Red flags were raised when the bookmaker continues to receive bets on Vassallo Argüello even after Davydenko won the first set, 6-2. Davydenko lost the second set, 3-6, and eventually retired from the match citing a foot injury while trailing 2-1 in the third set.
 
The 26-year-old Davydenko insists he did not reveal his foot injury to anyone outside of his camp prior to the Argüello match and explained the heavy betting activity on fact he suffered three straight opening-round losses — in Gstaad, Amersfoort and Umag — before he fell in the second round of Sopot.
 
 "I think because of the tournaments I [was] losing first round before," the 2006 Sopot champion said. "I won my first round [in Sopot]. I feel already before my first round I was injured, but I don't tell anyone. I have problem there. I don't know why guys can betting. I don't check by Internet [to see] who is betting. I don't know how much money putting there."
 
The Italian suspensions came one month after ATP Chief Executive Etienne de Villiers announced that Italian Alessio Di Mauro had been banned for nine months and fined $60,000 for betting on matches. Di Mauro, like Starace and Bracciali, placed small bets on other matches and did not bet on his own matches. Di Mauro is appealing his suspension.
 
Calling the ATP's action against its players an "injustice", the FIT charged the ATP is making scapegoats of its players partly as a PR ploy to show it is taking a stand on the gambling issue although no action has been announced in the Davydenko case. The implication in the FIT's statement is the ATP is going after players who placed small wagers in an effort to pacify public and media demand for action on the gambling controversy.
 
"Injustice has been done," the FIT said in a statement. "As with Alessio Di Mauro, the penalties are absolutely out of proportion with the size of infringements committed by the two players. Obviously, neither betted on their own matches. The ATP must have known about the bets made by the players for years, but it is only hitting them now to show that it is doing something about the real scandal of matches being fixed for dishonest gamblers."
 
At the U.S. Open in September, de Villiers announced the ATP has hired two former Scotland Yard investigators and sought support from the British Horseracing Authority (HRA) as it continues to conduct its investigation into irregular betting on Davydenko's placed on his match against Vassallo Argüello in Sopot. The ATP chief also said a lifetime ban will be placed on players found guilty of gambling improprieties involving their own matches.
 
"We have severe penalties. We can fine a player up to $100,000 for transgressing the code and a maximum lifetime ban," de Villiers told the media. "And trust met, if we find anyone [guilty of gambling] they will have the maximum ban imposed. There's going to be zero tolerance here. This is not something that we in tennis will condone."

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