ESPN has reported that the ATP had evidence of match fixing before the Davydenko match and the French Open wants gambling to just go away.

I bought a used car while I was staying in Santa Fe one summer. I had the car checked out before I bought it and the repair shop told me that the timing belt needed to be replaced. I’m only using the car for the summer, I thought to myself, the belt should be o.k. for a few months.One night, my friend Margaret and I drove to Albuquerque for the weekend. We’d just taken a left exit from route I-25 and we were entering the fast lane on route I-40 – one of the busiest interstate interchanges in the country – when the timing belt broke and the car rolled to a stop.

Here we were, precariously lodged on the edge of a highway while cars bore down on us as they ramped up their speed to enter the fast lane of the upcoming highway and all we had was a puny flashlight to wave at oncoming traffic. We were lucky no one ran us down and even luckier that nobody else died as they swerved their car to avoid us

This past week, ESPN reported the results of four months research into the Nikolay Davydenko/Martin Vassallo-Arguello match at Sopot in August of last year. All bets on the match at Betfair, an online gambling site, were voided because the betting pattern looked like the match had been fixed. ESPN’s research shows that the ATP had evidence of match fixing before the Davydenko match and didn’t do anything about it. That’s what happens when don’t take care of a problem even though you’re aware of it. It blows up in your face.

According to ESPN, Richard Ings, the ATP’s vice president of rules and competition, had evidence of a suspicious relationship between a big time gambler and an ATP player in 2005. The gambler was an Austrian named Martin Führer, and the player was Irakli Labadze who is from Georgia. Führer had befriended Labadze by hanging around ATP tournaments and he was making a lot of money from matches that Labadze lost. It got to the point where bookmakers refused to take bets from Führer.

Interestingly, the ATP fined Labadze $7500 for lack of effort in one of those matches. It was a foreshadowing of the $2,000 fine Davydenko received for lack of effort at the St. Petersburg Open last year. Davydenko successfully appealed the fine.

Ings was the guy who set up an agreement with Betfair to notify the ATP whenever they found an irregular betting pattern. He also had access to Betfair’s database and he used it to research Führer’s bets. However, Ings left the ATP a few months later and the ATP never followed up on his findings.

To be fair, match fixing is not easy to prove. ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers said as much to ESPN about the Davydenko match: “We may never know. We may get to the point where we think we know but we can’t prove it.” The match had an irregular betting pattern and the ATP knows who laid the biggest bets on the match, but that doesn’t prove it was fixed. For that you need evidence that gamblers asked Davydenko to throw the match.

Dealing with match fixing is not easy but the next step tennis has taken to deal with the problem of gambling is rather pathetic. The organizers of the French Open have filed an injunction against Betfair, Bwin and Ladbrokes, three online gambling sites, to stop them from taking bets on the event.

The injunction states that gambling companies are tainting the reputation of the French Open and using the tournament to make money. The organizers sound like a 5 year old refusing to eat spinach: “I hate spinach. Make it go away!”

Here is the problem with the complaints in the injunction.

Gambling sites may indirectly be tainting the French Open’s reputation by taking bets from gamblers who are fixing matches, but match fixing has been going on in all sports for all time. I’ve no doubt someone rubbed down a wrestler with grease at the ancient Greek Olympics then ran off to the local bookie and laid a bet on the guy.

Gambling on the French Open won’t stop unless you make all sports gambling illegal and even then, it won’t stop, it’ll just be forced underground. In that case, you might not notice irregular betting patterns and it might be much harder to find the gamblers who laid the bets whereas online gambling sites give you that information in real time.

Here’s the problem with the complaint that gamblers are making money off the French Open. The result of a sporting event is a news item. There’s nothing proprietary about a news item. I can lay a bet that Britney Spears will be back in a mental ward within six months – hey, I should take that bet – and Britney can’t do anything about.

This issue has already been addressed by the U.S. judicial systems in the case of CDM Sports versus Major League Baseball Advanced Media. MLBAM was charging a licensing fee to fantasy baseball sites to use its players’ statistics but you can find statistics in the box scores in any newspaper No one pays for them.

Laws in Europe may differ but I doubt it. You can’t charge someone for information that everyone gets for free and you can’t prevent newspapers from printing the outcome of a sporting event.

Professional tennis has worked closely with the British Horseracing Authority in the aftermath of the Davydenko match. I don’t see the BHA filing injunctions and clearing gamblers out of racing tracks. Other sports have had gambling controversies and match fixing. That’s how it is.

Tennis needs to make up for lost time and handle gambling the same way horseracing and soccer handle it. That starts by accepting gambling instead of avoiding it or wishing it away.