Tennis match-fixing scandal: Mardy Fish, players, coaches caught in corruption crackdown
The integrity body of tennis exposed 28 players, coaches and umpires last year. And three in particular underlined the challenges facing the sport. See the hall of shame.
Of all the disturbing corruption cases that the International Tennis Integrity Agency exposed in 2022, there were three that underlined the audacity and recklessness of cheating in tennis and the challenges authorities face in cleaning it up.
In September 2022, former Chilean professional player and coach Sebastian Rivera was banned for life and fined $360,000 after being found guilty of 64 match fixing offences, the highest number ever detected for any player.
Once ranked 705th in the world, Rivera made little effort to fight the charges with the ITIA reporting he “failed to engage meaningfully with the disciplinary process”.
In July 2022, three Tunisian chair umpires were given lengthy bans for manipulating the scores of matches they were officiating in.
SCROLL DOWN TO SEE WHICH PLAYERS AND COACHES WERE BANNED IN 2022
Majd Affi was banned for 20 years after being found guilty of 12 offences between 2017 and 2020.
Mohamed Ghassen Snene and Abderahim Gharsallah were each booted out of the sport for seven years for four separate offences in 2020.
The three officials were all caught for deliberately inputting the wrong results into their electronic scoring devices.
In October 2022, Mexican player Luis Patino — ranked 792nd in the world — was banned for three years for using steroids despite never failing a doping test.
He only got caught because he handed over his phone for an unrelated corruption case and investigators stumbled across photos of banned substances, including the steroid that brought down Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Patino came clean and confessed so got a one-year reduction from his initial four-year ban.
The ITIA’s Senior Director of Anti-Doping Nicole Sapstead said the case showed it was never too late to get caught.
“It is testament to our intelligence and investigations teams that we were able to pursue a non-analytical finding in this way and sends a clear message to anyone in the sport who is tempted to make a wrong turn that there can be repercussions, even years later.”
Originally published as Tennis match-fixing scandal: Faces of the 2022 tennis wall of shame
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