On Day One, Match-Fixing Is Hot Topic

WIMBLEDON, England, June 23 -- As chief executive of the All England club, Ian Ritchie is the man most responsible for the seamless staging of Wimbledon -- a job that demands a deft political touch and resolutely sunny disposition.

The Oxford-educated Ritchie prefers to work behind the scenes, ceding the spotlight to the sport's international stars while he oversees such thorny matters as the introduction of instant replay and the installation of a retractable roof over Centre Court.

But on Monday, the opening day of the 122nd Wimbledon Championships, found Ritchie inundated with interview requests from newspapers, wire services and worldwide TV outlets clamoring to know how seriously he regarded the matter of match-fixing in tennis and what exactly Wimbledon was doing about it.

Speculation about players dumping matches has a long history in tennis, but it gained new and ominous currency last year when nearly $7 million was wagered on a match in which fourth-ranked Nikolay Davydenko lost to an obscure Argentine in a second-tier tournament in Poland. Since then, several players have reportedly told investigators working for the Association of Tennis Professionals that they have been approached about fixing matches for a fee.

Then, on the eve of this year's Wimbledon, the Sunday Times of London published a front-page story outlining the findings of a report commissioned, in part, by the All England club that identified 45 matches over the last eight years as having attracted unusual betting patterns -- eight of them having occurred in early-round matches at Wimbledon.

On Monday Ritchie repeatedly stressed that the findings were one month old and based on speculation rather than hard facts. He lamented the timing of the news report. And he stressed that Wimbledon, as well as the sport's other Grand Slam events, was adopting the 15 security measures suggested in the document. But in no way, he insisted, was Wimbledon's integrity in question.

"You've got to be aware of a potential threat, and when we commissioned the report we were aware of a potential threat," Ritchie said in front of a BBC TV camera. "But it is a threat that applies across professional sports and all around the world. It is quite a big leap to go from irregular betting patterns to corruption and match-fixing."

As part of the new security measures at Wimbledon this year, players are permitted to bring only one person with them into the locker room. That's a radical change for players accustomed to traveling with a "team" of assistants, such as a coach, trainer, physical therapist and a parent or two.

The idea behind the restriction is that by limiting the number of people in the locker room, tournament officials can reduce the amount of "insider information," such as last-minute injury reports, that would be useful to those with nefarious intent.

The rule isn't being universally well received. "The good thing is we don't have so many people in the dressing room," said 10th-seeded Marcos Baghdatis. "The bad thing is that maybe some players need two people in the changing room, and that's important for those players."

Second-seeded Rafael Nadal is among them, accustomed to having his uncle-coach Toni Nadal accompany him to the locker room, as well as a physiotherapist who tapes his wrists and shins before each match. Nadal's request for an exemption has been denied. "Very strange and unfortunate," Nadal wrote Monday on the daily blog he is doing for the Times of London. "But it is not my tournament, so I don't make the rules."