Match-fixing in sport

The 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball team, known forever now as the 'Black Sox' after their role in a match-fixing scandal in the World Series. Photo / Wikimedia Commons

This weekend's news that members of the Pakistan cricket team were allegedly paid to bowl no-balls is just the latest in a long and chequered history of match-fixing scandals in sport.

It seems whenever there is a mixture of money and sport, be it organised betting through agencies, or private bets between wealthy individuals, there has been the temptation to influence the outcome unfairly.

It's not something that's confined to recent times, either.

The Ancient Olympics were almost constantly dealing with allegations of athletes accepting bribes to lose a competition and city-states which often tried to manipulate the outcome with large amounts of money.

These activities went on despite the oath each athlete took to protect the integrity of the events and the severe punishment sometimes inflicted on those who were caught.

Chariot racing was also dogged by race fixing throughout its history. And we all thought Charlton Heston won fair and square ...

Here's a list of some of the most infamous examples of match-fixing:

Italian Serie A soccer

It's known as 'The Beautiful Game', but soccer is a clear winner when it comes to documented match-fixing scandals.

Britain, Europe and South America have all had their turn in the spotlight.

Perhaps the most notorious and and with the most far-reaching consequences was the Italian Serie A soccer scandal.

Uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, the scandal implicated league champions Juventus, and other major teams including Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio.

Intercepted telephone calls showed examples of collusion between team managers and referee organisations.

Juventus were the champions of Serie A at the time. The teams were accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees.

Juventus was relegated to Serie B and forced to start the next season with a 30-point deduction. Lazio and Fiorentina were also sent down to Serie B, where they too entered the next championship with 'minus' points against their name.

Milan avoided enforced relegation but were stripped of 44 points from the 2006 season, dropping them out of contention for a place in the elite European competitions like the Champions League and the UEFA Cup.

Other scandals concerning referees who fixed matches for gambling purposes have been uncovered in Germany (the Bundesliga scandal) and Brazil.

1982 Soccer World Cup

Even Soccer's most sacrosanct stage, the World Cup, has not been immune.

In the 1982 FIFA World Cup, West Germany played Austria in the last match of group B. A West German victory by 1 or 2 goals would result in both teams advancing; any less and Germany was out; any more and Austria was out (and replaced by Algeria, who had just beaten Chile).

West Germany attacked hard and scored after 10 minutes. Afterwards, the players then proceeded to just kick the ball around aimlessly for the remainder of the match. Algerian supporters were so angered that they waved banknotes at the players, while a German fan burned his German flag in disgust.

By the second half, the commentators were recommending that viewers switch off their sets, rather than watch the debacle.

As a result, FIFA changed its tournament scheduling for subsequent World Cups so that the final pair of matches in each four team group are played simultaneously.

Boxing

Boxing is a sport that certainly has a bad rap when it comes to accusations of rigged bouts.

That's because it's so easy for a protagonist to 'take a dive' onto the canvas. No-one else really knows for certain how badly his opponent's punch affected him, so it's hard to prove later whether any fixing took place.

In addition, it's up to the discretion of a judge whether he gives a point to a particular boxer or not. This brings into question the validity of many "points decisions", wherein audience members are left baffled by a judge's score that doesn't seem to reflect what they just saw with their own eyes.

Just last month, ESPN reported on a light welterweight bout between Juan Diaz and Paul Maligaggi in Houston, Texas, which was awarded to hometown boy Diaz on a points decision. To ESPN's boxing analysts, it was a travesty of a result, with New Yorker Maligaggi clearly the better fighter on the night.

The Black Sox baseball disgrace

The Black Sox Scandal refers to an incident that took place around and during the play of the 1919 World Series.

The term "Black Sox" was coined as a name for the Chicago White Sox team from that era.

The team were accused of throwing games, and essentially giving the series to the Cincinnati Reds, for betting purposes.

Eight members of the major league franchise were banned for life from baseball.

Cricket's darkest days

In 2000 the Delhi police intercepted a conversation between a blacklisted bookie and the South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje in which they learnt that Cronje accepted money to throw matches.

A court of inquiry was set up and Cronje admitted to throwing matches. He was immediately banned from all cricket.

He also named Salim Malik (Pakistan), Mohammed Azharuddin and Ajay Jadeja (India). They too were banned from all cricket.

As a kingpin, Cronje exposed the dark side of betting, However, with his untimely death in an air crash in 2002, most of his sources also have escaped law enforcement agencies.

Two South African cricketers, Herschelle Gibbs and Nicky Boje, were also sought by the Delhi police for their role in the match fixing saga.

A few years before, in 1998, Australian players Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were fined for revealing information about the 'weather' to a bookmaker.

Game, set and mis-match

Tennis' hallowed turf of Wimbledon has not escaped being soiled by the scourge of match-fixing.

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported last year that eight matches at Wimbledon were reported to the tennis authorities on suspicion that their results have been fixed by professional gambling syndicates.

The matches were named in a dossier compiled by leading bookmaking companies, which monitor suspect betting patterns and players thought to be willing to throw games.

Four of the matches were from the 2007 men's singles at Wimbledon and involved non-British players who each lost by three sets.

The dossier identifies sudden spikes in the sums wagered. More than £450m was bet on the 2007 Wimbledon tournament through just one British internet site, Betfair.

If you think tennis professionals wouldn't have a bar of match-fixing, because of the generous prize-money they would be missing out on, think again.

A player at Wimbledon would earn £10,000 for competing in the first round, with extra prize money of only £6,325 for progressing to the second round.

On the other hand, bets of £400,000 - a figure mentioned in the dossier for just one internet site - could net a player a windfall of £80,000 or more, depending on the odds.

Horse racing

In March 2004 top British jockey Kieren Fallon had a comfortable lead on a ride named Ballinger Ridge as he headed along the final straight in the main race of the meeting at Lingfield Park Racecourse.

Fallon, a top exponent at his trade, apparently failed to notice the favourite gaining on him from behind, eased off. He was dramatically overtaken before the finishing post.

This started a group of investigators to suspect that something wasn't completely kosher here.

Later, in 2006, Fallon was one of six jockeys who were arrested as part of a police investigation into the alleged fixing of over 80 races in the previous two years.

They were charged with conspiracy to defraud by interfering with the running of horses to ensure they lost races. All denied the charges.

Fallon and two others had their UK racing licences suspended.

Driven to desperation

Motorsport has had its share of controversies - and Formula One racing in particular.

Michael Schumacher parking his Ferrari on the racing line at Monaco in 2006 to block Fernando Alonso's last qualifying lap....

The McLaren spying scandal two years ago (although mechanics have always discussed technical data among themselves).

But nothing has shaken the sport quite like the news that Renault ordered a driver to deliberately crash so his teammate could win a race.

Exposure of Renault's order for Nelson Piquet Jr. to spin his car into a concrete wall at last year's Singapore Grand Prix, helping teammate Fernando Alonso to victory, yesterday prompted the departure of long-serving managing director and prominent F1 personality Flavio Briatore.

Further punishment, such as race suspensions, may follow.

Outside of sport

And although match-fixing is a term ascribed principally to sport, obviously, there are examples outside of sport.

One occurred during the run of a wildly successful US television game show in the 1950s.

Charles van Doren was a contestant on NBC's quiz show Twenty One. A lecturer in English at Columbia University, van Doren became an authentic popular phenomenon whose on-screen charisma earned him over $120,000 in prize money (that's lots for that era), the cover of Time magazine, and a spot on NBC's Today show. He had genuine all-American looks - and was smart, too.

From the moment van Doren walked onto the set of Twenty One in 1956, it was inevitable he would ultimately come up against the reigning champion, a very un-telegenic brainbox called Herbert Stempel.

The pair's rivalry culminated in a head-to-head battle that was the most-watched quiz show of all time, when, after enormous pre-publicity, the pair faced off for all the season's prize money.

And the show lived up to the drama, with van Doren emerging triumphant when his opponent couldn't come up with the correct answer to a question about England's Tudor royal family.

'Drama' is an appropriate word - for what the millions watching at home didn't realise was, far from being a genuine test of general knowledge between two contestants, the entire show was scripted, stage-managed and rigged from go to whoa.

Stempel later went public, resulting in a Grand Jury investigation into practices on the show.

In 1994 the story was made into a film, Quiz Show, starring Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro.

And in the Oscar-winning film SlumDog Millionaire, there is a strong suggestion that the game 'Who wants to be a millionaire' is fixed.

SOURCE: Additional information from Wikipedia

- Article first published Friday Sep 18, 2009