Karim Hossam was one of the best young tennis players in the world. He looked set to play at the biggest tournaments, with the top players of the game. Instead he was sucked into one of the biggest match-fixing rings yet discovered in a sport riddled with corruption. The BBC's Simon Cox and Paul Grant use confidential documents to tell the story of his downfall.
It was inside a modest hotel room in Tunisia in June 2017 that Karim Hossam's tennis career started to unravel. Across from the 24-year-old sat two former British police detectives. They were investigators for the Tennis Integrity Unit, which probes corruption within the game, and they suspected Karim had been fixing matches. In a series of interviews over six months he revealed how four years earlier he had become a part of one of the biggest match-fixing rings in tennis.
The International Tennis Federation Futures tournament at Sharm el-Sheikh is a distant cousin to the glamour, money and crowds of Wimbledon or the French Open. Played at a small tennis club next to a shopping mall, there is a smattering of spectators and the prize money for the whole tournament is $15,000 (£11,500) - about a quarter of the sum made by a first-round loser at Wimbledon. Karim Hossam had already won the tournament four times when he arrived to compete there again in 2013. Still only 20, the young Egyptian player was the great hope for North African tennis. As one of the best junior players in the world, hovering on the edge of the top 10, he had started to play in the big ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) tournaments with the stars of the sport. He'd played at the Australian Open and the French Open, but the ITF (International Tennis Federation) tournament at Sharm was one of the many around the world where thousands of lower-ranked players try to scrape a living. Karim Hossam was preparing for a match when a player he didn't know well approached him. “Do you want to lose the match and get $1,000 (£770)?” he asked. The same player had contacted Hossam months earlier, at the Qatar Open, asking if he wanted to lose the first set for $1,000. On that occasion he was facing one of the world's best players, Richard Gasquet - then ranked ninth in the world, some 300 places above Hossam - and he replied: “I'm playing Gasquet, I'm not here to sell a match.”
But in Sharm el-Sheikh it was different. It didn't really matter if he won or lost and after thinking it over Hossam decided to go ahead with it. He told the investigators, “I just wanted to try it because I never tried it… I thought this guy was actually like lying to me… I didn't know that betting existed.” The player wasn't lying, though, and after losing the match Hossam went with him to a local branch of Western Union to get his money.
The gamblers behind this would have made much more than $1,000, and would have bet on other matches too, often making multiple bets on one match. “Having that insider knowledge of people involved in match-fixing in a specific sport particularly tennis… you can really make some fairly decent money,” says Fred Lord, Director for Ant-Ccorruption at the International Centre of Sport Security in Qatar. “We're talking figures around about half a million euros.”
What Karim Hossam didn't realise was that he had sold his career for $1,000. Being found guilty of a single offence by the tennis authorities is punishable by a lifetime ban from the game.
Hossam couldn't keep it to himself so he told his father, who had helped to finance his career. He told investigators his father “was really pissed and he was like, ‘You're ruining your life'”.
After this first offence, Hossam said, he tried for a while to avoid doing it again. But he also thought that if he had more money it would be easier to advance his career. “I wanted to go play big tournaments, you know, like I was going to the US for camp or whatever and I needed money,” he said. – BBC
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