February 03, 2008	Sunday	Muharram 24, 1429

PARIS, Feb 2: The French Tennis Federation (FFT) said on Friday it wants to ban online betting during the French Open.

Jean-Francois Vilotte, the FFT Director General, said the organisation had already launched proceedings against a certain number of betting sites and was pressing on with test cases in Belgium to determine how to proceed further in tackling a phenomenon which knows no borders.

Vilotte added that the FFT was determined to stop betting sites piggybacking on official Roland Garros sites.

French Open turnover at the tournament itself across the fortnight comes at an estimated 10 million euros.Vilotte said that the organisation had found punters had placed between 500,000 million and one billion euros of bets across some 140 sites - “sometimes on elements of no sporting interest” such as the length of a set.

The FFT is wary at a time when players, including Italians Potito Starace and Daniele Bracciali, are serving bans for betting on matches.

The ATP, the governing body of the men’s game, found that an investigation, launched in August 2007, found 26-year-old Starace had bet on matches during a period from February 2006 to May 2006.

Bracciali, 29, was guilty of betting on matches from May 2004 to January 2005.

Gayle David Bradshaw, ATP’s Executive Vice President, said their actions violated the organisation’s Anti-Corruption Programme, communicated to all players on a regular basis, stating that gambling on tennis by players, associates or staff will not be tolerated.

Fellow Italian player Alessio Di Mauro, the world number 130, was banned for nine months in November for betting on matches.

Meanwhile, Russian world number four Nikolay Davydenko is the subject of an investigation after suspicious betting patterns emerged in a match he played in Poland in August.—AFP