Report: Secret documents reveal alleged widespread match fixing in tennis

A total of 16 players are named in connection with match fixing in world tennis in documents that were publicly unveiled Sunday - the same day as the opening round of the Australian Open.

The seven-year investigation, dubbed "The Tennis Racket" and coordinated by BuzzFeed News and the BBC, was first revealed to authorities in 2008. However, no players have been formally sanctioned nor prevented from playing in Grand Slam competitions, including Wimbledon.

"They could have got rid of a network of players that would have almost completely cleared the sport up," one of the investigators, Mark Phillips, told BuzzFeed News. "We gave them everything tied up with a nice pink bow on top and they took no action at all."

The investigation was prompted by an August 2007 match at the Prokom Open ATP tennis tournament between Russian Nikolay Davydenko (No. 4 in the world at the time) and Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina, which resulted in "millions of pounds worth of highly suspicious betting triggered by accounts in Moscow."

ATP president and chairman Chris Kermode held a press conference refuting the report almost immediately following its release.

"The TIU and tennis authorities absolutely reject any suggestion that evidence of match fixing has been suppressed," he said.

A press release was later released by the organization, which said "there is a zero‐tolerance approach to all aspects of corruption," and that the governing bodies "are and will continue to be firmly committed to protecting the integrity of the sport."

After the report emerged in 2008, a tennis integrity code was introduced, but it can't be retrospectively enforced. So, although players named in the report were said to be implicated, no new investigations were opened, according to the head of the Tennis Integrity Unit, Nigel Willerton.

Along with the aforementioned suspicious betting in Russia, the first page of the file says Northern Italian and Sicilian betting groups were "identified as of concern."