“Wltennis is one of the sports most infected by match-fixing and the bets. In general terms, the players most involved in this problem without a solution are those who have the greatest economic limitations to develop professionally and are, in a certain way, “outside the system”.
However, a new journalistic investigation implicated two prominent tennis players who are within the top 40 of the ATP singles world ranking: the Georgian Nikoloz Basilashvili (actual 25°) and al ruso Aslan Karatsev (40°).
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According to a report by ZDF (Germany’s public channel), the two tennis players and their former coach, the Belarusian Yahor Yatsyk, They are protagonists of a sports fraud, the so-called “match fixing”.
According to the German outlet, the coach offered players money to lose tennis matches at least twice in the past. This is what emerges from the private files of the International Tennis Federation (ITF) available to ZDF. Karatsev and Yatsyk they worked together between 2018 and 2021. Basilashvili also traveled with the Belarusian coach for about 18 months from 2013.
An Eastern European-born tennis coach, who preferred to remain anonymous out of fear, referred to Yatsyk on ZDF: “He always has a lot of money with him, he is on the circuit and looking for young players who have financial or mental problems. Those who can be easily won over with money… Yatsyk worked closely with both players and watched them for years. They are both incredibly talented players. But they had financial problems at the beginning and also important phases of weakness and fell in the classification. He reached out to them at every critical moment in their careers.”
The ZDF chain had access to the cases of five allegedly rigged matches and with unusually high stakes moves, in which Karatsev is said to be involved.
More details
Two matches occurred during the collaboration period with Yatsyk: a doubles in a Finland 2019 tournament and a doubles in Kazakhstan 2020, both from the Challenger Tour (the second professional category of tennis). The matches are before Karatsev’s big jump: he became very popular by reaching the semifinals of the Australian Open 2021 being 114th in the world and having surpassed the classification.
Yatsyk and Karatsev were questioned by French police during the 2020 French Open. The French newspaper L’Equipe had already reported it on May 2, when it became known that the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) suspended for 16 years a former top 170 player, born from Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia: Ksenia Palkina . Investigations linked Palkina to Yatsyk.
Karatsev, 28, ranked 12th last February, is suspected of “manipulating” for the last time a match in the Stuttgart tournament, last June.
In the first round of doubles, paired with Jonathan Erlich (Israel), they fell 6-4, 6-0 to Rohan Bopanna (India) and Denis Shapovalov (Canada). According to the German media, “these are notoriously high bets on defeat. The organizers reported that they knew nothing about match-fixing.”
Tom Mace, COO of Sportradar, a company that monitors the sports betting market, said: “I can confirm that we have analyzed Aslan Karatsev’s matches, but due to our contracts with the ATP and ITIA I cannot give information on specific results.”
The ITIA did not comment on Karatsev and Yatsyk, nor about why they are not suspended – at least temporarily – despite the investigations in France. Karatsev gave an interview to ZDF, but later retracted his statement. Likewise, according to the Russian media, the process against Basilashvili is pending in the ITIA for match-fixing.
According to the report, a 2021 Wimbledon first-round doubles match between Basilashvili and Moldovan Radu Albot is under investigation as protagonists (defeat by 3-6, 6-2 and 6-2 against the Hungarian Marton Fucsovics and the Italian Stefano Travaglia).
During the match they recorded “notoriously high stakes on the loss (of the match for Basilashvili and Albot) and amounts to half a million US dollars.”
In 2020, Basilashvili was charged with family violence in the presence of a minor. Even, In May of that year he was arrested after having “beaten his ex-wife after a dispute the day before in the presence of their son.”
In the last Wimbledon contest, which ended this Sunday with Novak Djokovic’s victory against Nick Kyrgios, Basilashvili reached the third round (he lost to the Dutchman Tim Van Rijthoven), while Karatsev was unable to perform in London due to the All England ban to Russian and Belarusian players as punishment for the warlike invasion of Ukraine.
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