Last year’s Australian Open boys champion finds himself charged with match fixing in his native Australia.
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18-year-old Oliver Anderson, who won the Australian Open Boys title in 2016, is under investigation by local police and the Sporting Intelligence Unit. The alleged incident occurred during the Traralgon Challenger event in Victoria, Australia last October.
"Oliver is cooperating fully with authorities. He now awaits the legal process," a family spokesman representative said.
Anderson, currently ranked No. 743 in the world, is charged with fixing the first set of a match he played at the Challenger. Anderson lost the first set but then went on to win the match in three sets.
After the news broke, video surfaced of the actual match in question.
According to the BBC, Victoria Police released a statement saying “Sporting Integrity Intelligence Unit detectives and bookmakers assisted with the investigation. The Queensland man was charged with engaging in conduct that corrupts a betting outcome."
While competing at the ATP event in Doha, reigning Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic weighed in on the news about Anderson.
“Very disappointed. Very disappointing to hear, that, especially considering the fact that he’s young and won the junior grand slam,” Djokovic said per the Sydney Herald-Sun. “Obviously the quality is there and the potential is there. I don’t understand why he has (allegedly) done it. Again, everybody has their own reasons. They behave the way they think is best for them at the certain moment. Everybody makes mistakes. I hope he’s going to learn from that.”
Last January, a joint investigation by the BBC and Buzzfeed revealed that that Tennis Integrity Unit, that oversees policing the sport against match fixing, failed to do anything on several suspicious matches involving top 50 ranked players all the way back to 2008.