Sunny skies are forecast for Melbourne, with a top of 31 degrees for the start of the Australian Open. We hope the tournament is successful, and we wish all participants the best of luck. But however bright the weather, a dark cloud looms over the horizon for Australian tennis, in the form of a series of corruption charges against junior players.
Three Australians have been found guilty of corruption by the Tennis Integrity Unit. Another has been charged with match fixing. Further investigations are continuing which suggest the corruption problem is wider than first thought.
Reigning Australian Open boys champion Oliver Anderson has been charged by police with match fixing.Credit: Pat Scala
That all those charged are junior players, relatively low in the world rankings makes no difference. Nor does it make any difference that the offences occurred in regional tournaments on the lower tiers of international professional competition. The cases show that corruption has started. The rot is setting in.
Several factors make the pursuit of corrupt players difficult, and the process unsatisfactory. First, how do authorities prove that a missed serve, say, was deliberate or just bad luck? A great deal of supporting evidence is required – not just the performance on court, but records of phone calls to associates, evidence of irregular betting patterns, and more. Tennis's authorities would have to be everywhere, all the time, to cover the matches where corrupt conduct is possible.
Second, because evidence is so hard to gather, justice takes a long time. The recent guilty findings relate to a match played in Toowoomba in 2013. How can the public be sure that games played now are above board? Will we find out only in, say, 2021 that something was wrong in this week's matches? Tennis, a sport which already struggles to retain the public's affections as a result of the wayward behaviour of some of its stars, may need to put more effort into finding the players who bring the game into disrepute in more substantial ways.
It should consider also how to make corruption less attractive to junior players. Well-rewarded senior players are rarely tempted to throw matches for a bribe; the loss of endorsements, match fees and prize money if they were found out is disincentive enough. For juniors struggling on the fringes of world ranking however, a bribe might represent twice their annual income. If they were paid more, the temptation would be less.
A third difficulty is the law itself: Australia's states pursue and punish match fixers under different laws. In 2014 Victoria Police were unable to extradite a known match fixer from Finland because he had not set foot in Victoria, as the state's law required. NSW police had to take over the case. In this era of globalised sport, there is a strong case for the Commonwealth to take over the policing of match fixing. At the very least Canberra should take the lead to ensure the states have uniform legislation, free of loopholes.
Many – this newspaper included – have warned in the past about the dire consequences of betting and professionalism in sport – that the combination of big money to be earned within, and alongside, major sports opens up the temptation to corruption, and that corruption once entrenched will kill the sport on which it feeds.
It is a reasonable point – yet perhaps there are enough people who are willing to watch questionable matches to allow sports to survive. Perhaps warnings about the collapse of tennis – and other former amateur sports which have become professional in recent decades, in which betting is now commonplace and where matches have started to be rigged – are premature. Horse racing, where betting has always been allowed, has been afflicted sporadically for many decades by race-fixing, and yet remains popular. Indeed the threat of corruption gives racecourses and those who frequent them a slightly raffish quality which may add to their charm. Will this be the fate of tennis, cricket, rugby and the rest? Will they, instead of entertaining the public as genuine contests of pure athleticism, become more cynical and dubious exercises in which skill and power are only two of the factors at play, the others being drugs, politics and money?
Perhaps. But if they did survive in this form, it would be a sad decline from their previous high standards – depressing evidence of the power of money to motivate human beings to do both the best and the worst of which they are capable.