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IMG’s vice president told AOL Fanhouse this week that the company’s CEO did in fact bet on the 2007 Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal French Open final. IMG owns several tennis tournaments and represents, not only Roger Federer, but Maria Sharapova, Venus Williams and Tiger Woods.
"And you wrote that (IMG CEO Theodore Forstmann) bet against Roger Federer,'' the VP said. "That isn't true. He bet on Federer to beat Rafael Nadal (in the 2007 French Open final). He lost $40,000 on that match.''
A lawsuit alleges that Federer provided Forstmann with “insider information”, something the tennis pro has since denied.
"If it were a different player, I would hope that it's obviously not true," Federer told reporters (last week) at a tournament in Shanghai. "But because it involves my name somewhere out there, I know it's 100% not true. Pretty relaxed about this because I'm for complete honesty for the sport.
"Leave the game better off then when I arrived to the sport, even though it was already a great platform I had. The last thing I would do is harm the sport ... I would never do such a thing."
Fears over tennis match fixing have come to the surface in recent years.
ATP executive chairman and president Etienne de Villiers once declared that match-fixing in the sport could ultimately kill tennis.
"We are in the show business world and the basis for that is integrity," he said during a sports conference in 2007. "If we are not true to the values of what our sport stands for, the sport dies.
"Sport endures because of its unpredictability, take that away and you don't have a show.”
Online sportsbooks have occasionally stopped payouts on tennis bets following what they deem to be “suspicious patterns” of wagering. – Alejandro Botticelli, Gambling911.com
