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February 5 - The French tennis federation is suing three online betting giants in an attempt to stop punters from gambling on the outcome of French Open matches. Betfair, BWin, and Ladbrokes are all facing an injunction that seeks to prevent them from offering betting markets for the second grand slam event of 2008.
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The legal action stems from the fact that cheating is rife in tennis with huge fortunes made on betting exchanges when players throw games. Many professional sports face the same problem but only the French could come up with the abuse of logic (well, maybe the Americans are capable of this kind of fuzzy thinking also) that seeks to ban the gambling companies from doing legal, legitimate business.
Imagine if you will that a company is listed on the stock exchange and that company has an internal corruption scandal. The exchange may suspend trading on that stock, if the exchange believes that it is necessary. It would be outrageous for the company to sue the exchange and demand that no one be allowed to trade.
There is cheating in tennis, and the reason players succumb to mysterious foot injuries that force them to default (we're not mentioning any names here, but we'll give you a clue: it's a Russian foot, and it's been hot for a while now) is because vast sums are bet on the outcome of the game. Mobsters are probably involved as well as other nasty elements. The solution is to ban the players who cheat. The solution is not to shoot the messenger and ban online gambling!
In fact it is purely thanks to online gambling firms that the tennis federations now know they have a scandal on their hands. It is solely because of rigorous security checks in place at betting exchanges that this problem was unmasked in the first place! Companies like Betfair were the messengers that pointed out the issue, and their reward is a civil suit throughout Europe.
If you ban legitimate companies from offering wagers on the game of tennis or any other sport for that matter then that process just goes underground. It does not magically disappear.
You can stop all the licensed bookies from offering tennis bets, and then all the unlicensed guys can step in and offer a book on the event. That way games will still be thrown, the way boxing fights used to be thrown, and no one will ever see the suspicious betting patterns that give the scam away. Without legitimate betting markets there will still be cheating at the French Open, only it will never go public.
But you see, that's what the organizers really want at the end of the day. They don't care if there is cheating, as long as it isn't publicized because then they can simply pretend it didn't happen and the "reputation" of the French Open will remain blissfully and ignorantly unsmeared.
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