Sports under fire

If sports is supposed to be a metaphor for the struggles of life, something’s wrong in the way it’s delivering the message. A quick look at the international sports headlines over the past week will show you what we mean. Sordid tales of dishonesty, indifference by callous sports officials, doping and game-fixing are putting less attention to wonderful stories of the Golden State Warriors revolutionizing basketball, Manny Pacquiao ending his career with a fight against Timothy Bradley for the chance to go out a world champion and China’s world No. 133 tennis player Zhang Shuai advancing to the third round of the Australian Open without dropping a set as the lone surviving qualifier

The popularity of sports all over the world has become its own enemy. With so much money invested in sports, it is inevitable that commercialization will lead to greed. Sports isn’t to blame, it’s the victim and the fans are the ultimate losers because they pay good money not knowing if they’re getting short-changed.

Sports isn’t the root of the evil, it’s money. Betting on results has brought a dimension of uncertainty in how outcomes are settled because of the enormity of the wagers involved. The Indian Express recently explored ways of fixing a tennis match. One is by tanking where a player deliberately loses a match, sometimes by faking an injury. There are apparently arrangements where the loser keeps the prize money and the winner gains ranking points. Richard Ings, who used to supervise rules and competition for the Association of Tennis Professionals, once said players confessed to being offered $50,000 to throw first round matches.

With Ings’ revelation, you now wonder about Rafael Nadal’s 7-6, 4-6, 3-6, 7-6, 6-2 loss to fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco in the first round of the Australian Open last week. Did he tank? In 2013, Nadal also lost a first round match at Wimbledon, bowing to world No. 135 Steve Darcis. You start doubting the integrity of the game with revelations like Ings’.

Another way to fix a tennis match is by a set-up where a player wins the first set and starts the second strongly to keep the odds in his favor. Then, bettors aware of the scheme begin to wager for the losing player who stages a dramatic comeback and cleans up. A third way is by spot-fixing where bets are placed on individual moments during a game. Other ways are by retirement although bookies usually refuse to pay out on an incomplete match and by a half-fix where players deliberately keep it close to draw more bets.

Pim Verschuuren, co-author of the book “Sports Betting and Corruption,” said it’s easy to manipulate a tennis match because it’s an individual sport. “There is a big financial gap between the players and you can bet on anything, any aspect of the game,” he said. It is estimated that as much as 200 billion Euros or the equivalent of P10.3 trillion are in the betting cycle for a season. A report from Paris carried by The Times of India said tennis represents 20 to 25 percent of global online sports betting and a 50 percent share of the live betting market or the highly-specialized system which tracks a game until the end, sometimes on a point by point basis.

Former British Davis Cupper Arvind Parmar recently disclosed that two hours before he was due on the court in a Challenger tournament in Holland in 2004, a fixer offered tens of thousands of Euros in an envelope to lose in two sets. “It was a substantial amount, way more than I would have earned from winning the tournament and more than most players at that level would make in a year,” said Parmar.

Austrian player Daniel Koellerer once admitted he was offered money to lose a match and double to lose in straight sets. Ings said match-fixing is “a regular thing” in tennis. “Prize money at lesser tournaments can be paltry and a year on the tennis tour can set a player back more than 100,000 pounds, making it tempting to cash in on the occasional fix,” said the Indian Express. “Ings realized the sport was particularly vulnerable to corruption because tens of thousands of matches are played each year, with billions of pounds at stake on the gambling markets. Most importantly, unlike most other sports, it only takes one player to fix the outcome.”

Cricket hasn’t been spared from the fixing anomaly. Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews recently testified that bowling coach Anusha Samaranayake and net bowler Gayan Bishwajith conspired to influence players to under-perform during a test match against West Indies last October. Thousands of dollars were supposedly involved in the fix to result in “a batting collapse.” Anusha was later suspended for two months. You wonder if the penalty is enough of a deterrent to avoid a relapse.

In athletics, doping was found to be a rampant practice in Russia and International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president Lord Sebastian Coe of England has denied covering up the scandal. Two weeks ago, former Russian athletics president Valentin Balakhnichev was banned from the sport for life. Late last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency reported the practice of a systematic, state-sponsored doping and related corruption in Russia.