In the first week of the 2024 US Open, Jiri Lehecka played on court four with a spectator seated directly behind his bench. The man talked at him for the first three sets. You can’t do it. You are tired. He’s better than you are.
Lehecka won the match anyway. He also asked the chair umpire whether anything could be done, and the reply is the whole story: “Yeah, I can’t do anything as long as he’s not insulting you.” Lehecka’s view is that the man had money on him to lose, and that he had come to court four specifically to change the outcome.
That is the scene Tumaini Carayol reports from this year’s US Open for the Guardian: bettors in the stands attempting to influence matches from courtside, and a sport whose rule book gives officials almost nothing to act on.
What players describe
Lorenzo Musetti, the world No 14, is clear that this is not an Italian problem. “It happened a lot of times, not just in Italy, but in every part of the world,” he says, describing crowds where it is obvious that some spectators have bet against the home favourite and are working on the player rather than cheering their own pick. Last year the Swiss player Leandro Riedi confronted a spectator he believed had money on him to win, then reported him to the chair umpire.
The exposure is unevenly distributed. Top players compete on show courts with distance between them and the crowd. Lower-ranked players are placed on smaller courts where a single voice carries — and that is where the incidents cluster, at grand slams and on the lower-level World Tennis Tour, where small crowds make individual bettors conspicuous. The Italian Open and the US Open both come up repeatedly in players’ accounts.
Lehecka’s umpire exchange is worth dwelling on. The spectator, as Lehecka describes him, “knew exactly where the line was” — close enough to disrupt a professional athlete for three sets, far enough from abuse that the official had no grounds to remove him.
The commercial contradiction
Three days before this year’s US Open began, the tournament announced a partnership with Kalshi, the prediction market that lists sports outcomes alongside elections and weather. Almost immediately, the US Open app began sending push notifications for Kalshi-sponsored articles offering match predictions.
Carayol’s line on this is the one that sticks: while players absorb the negative consequences of betting, “the US Open profits from the same beast.”
Nothing in the ATP, WTA or grand slam rule books targets disruptive bettors. Umpires can act on abuse and nothing else. The organising bodies have, so far, declined to write the rule.
Who bears the cost
Players do, and mostly not the famous ones. Beyond the stands, players receive abuse, threats and hate speech on social media from gamblers after losses and after wins. Betting is also at the root of the sport’s match-fixing cases, where the people banned have overwhelmingly been lower-ranked and lower-paid.
The players themselves are split on whether any of this is fixable. Jakub Mensik treats it as settled: “It’s basically already part of us, part of all of the athletes, and we just unfortunately have to manage it. There is no other way.” Tommy Paul: “It’s kind of what we signed up for.” Musetti wants the governing bodies to provide security, on the grounds that “we cannot do much on the court.” Coco Gauff says no unruly gambler will get into her head.
The one thing nobody disputes is the direction. A sport that now sells betting inventory through its own app is asking its players to tolerate the customers it just acquired.