Tennis authorities will be asked by a Parliamentary committee "why they kept sanctions secret against umpires who had been banned for betting offences, amid calls from MPs for a specialist sport crime unit to help deal with the issue," according to Owen Gibson of the London GUARDIAN. At a hearing of the culture, media and sport select committee in the spring, the game's governing bodies will be asked to respond to an investigation that "forced the International Tennis Federation to reveal that two umpires had been banned and four more suspended pending an investigation." Tory MP Damian Collins, who sits on the committee and is a longstanding campaigner on sports governance issues, said that the revelations were a "wake-up call" for the sport. Collins said, "The Tennis Integrity Unit is only really accountable to other people in tennis. There's no outside scrutiny. ... They seem to have been in denial about the scale of the problem. Everyone in tennis knows it's a huge problem." Collins also called on the sport to review "whether it should facilitate betting on low-level tournaments." Tennis has become a "hugely popular betting product" and the ITF signed a $70M deal with data company SportRadar to "give it access to live data and odds that are then sold to betting companies" (GUARDIAN, 2/10).
