{"id":659,"date":"2007-08-03T16:38:25","date_gmt":"2007-08-04T00:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=659"},"modified":"2007-08-03T16:38:25","modified_gmt":"2007-08-04T00:38:25","slug":"davydenko-is-the-7-million-dollar-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/davydenko-is-the-7-million-dollar-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Davydenko is the $7 Million Dollar Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gamblers bet $7 million against Nikolay Davydenko in a match at Sopot and that was after he\u2019d won the first set.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m here at the Acura Classic watching Maria Sharapova<\/strong> annihilate Sania Mirza<\/strong>. This is the last year for the Acura Classic and the last Tier I tournament on the U.S. West Coast so I was a bit amused to learn that there is a gambling controversy in the ATP \u2013 the men\u2019s side of the tour. Someone actually thinks tennis is popular enough to plunk down a whole lot of money on it.<\/p>\n

Gamblers on Betfair.com<\/a>, a British online gambling site, bet over $7 million dollars that Nikolay Davydenko<\/strong> would lose his second round match to Martin Vassallo-Arguello<\/strong> in Sopot, Poland. That\u2019s not so unusual except that most of the bets were made after Davydenko won the first set 6-2. Davydenko ended up losing the second set and retired in the third set with a foot injury.<\/p>\n

If you look closer the situation looks even more curious. Davydenko got to the semifinals at the French Open and he\u2019s a top five player yet he\u2019d lost in the first round in his previous three tournaments, all of them clay court events.<\/p>\n

The ATP is not like the National Football League (NFL) where teams are required to disclose a player\u2019s injury status. The NFL has such rules so other teams can prepare properly for an upcoming game. But those rules are also an unspoken nod to the huge gambling activity on NFL games. Gamblers would be extremely angry if the star quarterback turned up on the sideline after they\u2019d waged a pretty penny.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s not much here. Davydenko also lost his first match at three consecutive clay court events last year: Valencia, Monte Carlo and Barcelona.<\/p>\n

While we don\u2019t know if Davydenko was injured during that time or not, we do know he\u2019d play even if his foot was falling off. He\u2019s notorious for playing the most tournaments of any of the top players. Last year the captain of the Russian Davis Cup team sat him down because he went all the way to China for a tournament after playing the U.S. Open and he was too exhausted to play when he arrived in Moscow.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think people suspect Davydenko of throwing the match for the same reason we don\u2019t think NBA players throw games: they make too much money. Tim Donaghy<\/strong>, the NBA referee who is accused of influencing NBA games, made around $280,000 a year. Davydenko has made almost $1 million dollars already this year and over $6 million in his career.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that he\u2019s gambled away his fortune and his lenders are putting the squeeze on him. A mobster from Uzbekistan named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was accused of trying to fix ice skating events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and Russian tennis players were known to hang out with him. But Davydenko moved to Germany when he was fifteen. His ATP profile says he moved back to Russia in 2004 but I understand that he continues to live in Germany and he\u2019s trying to move to Austria because Germany would not give him residence.<\/p>\n

Maybe the Germans uncovered a gambling habit, who knows? There are a lot of things we don\u2019t know at the moment but there is one thing we do know. The world of sports benefits when gambling is legal and controlled. Internet gambling is legal in Britain and Betfair has an agreement with the ATP to report irregular betting activity. If sports gambling had been legal in the U.S., the NBA may have been unable to uncover Tim Donaghy\u2019s activities earlier than it did.<\/p>\n

In fact, Betfair got an award from the Queen of England for being an innovative enterprise. Can you image the President of the U.S. giving a gambling operation an award of any kind?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in the process of getting an interview with a Betfair user who gambles on tennis. When I get more information, I\u2019ll pass it along. Meanwhile, the ATP could help us all by acknowledging the influence of gambling and instituting rules requiring players to disclose injuries.<\/p>\n

\n

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Gamblers bet $7 million against Nikolay Davydenko in a match at Sopot and that was after he\u2019d won the first set. I\u2019m here at the Acura Classic watching Maria Sharapova annihilate Sania Mirza. This is the last year for the Acura Classic and the last Tier I tournament on the U.S. West Coast so I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atp-players","category-atp-tournaments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}