I bought a used car while I was staying in Santa Fe one summer. I had the car checked out before I bought it and the repair shop told me that the timing belt needed to be replaced. I’m only using the car for the summer, I thought to myself, the belt should be OK for a few months. One night, my friend Margaret and I drove to Albuquerque for the weekend. We’d just taken a left exit from route I-25 and we were entering the fast lane on route I-40 – one of the busiest interstate interchanges in the country – when the timing belt broke and the car rolled to a stop.

Here we were, precariously lodged on the edge of a highway while cars bore down on us as they ramped up their speed to enter the fast lane and all we had was a puny flashlight to wave at oncoming traffic. We were lucky no one ran us down and even luckier that nobody died as they swerved their cars to avoid us

This past week, ESPN reported the results of four months’ research into the Nikolay Davydenko/Martin Vassallo Arguello match at Sopot in August of last year. All bets on the match at Betfair, an online gambling site, were voided because the betting pattern looked like the match had been fixed. ESPN’s research shows that the ATP had evidence of match-fixing before the Davydenko affair and didn’t do anything about it. That’s what happens when you don’t take care of a problem even though you're aware of it. It blows up in your face.

The organisers [of the French Open] sound like a five-year-old refusing to eat spinach – “I hate spinach. Make it go away!”

According to ESPN, Richard Ings, the ATP’s vice president of rules and competition, had evidence of a suspicious relationship between a big-time gambler and an ATP player in 2005. The gambler was an Austrian named Martin Führer, and the player was Irakli Labadze who is from Georgia. Führer had befriended Labadze by hanging around ATP tournaments and he was making a lot of money from matches that Labadze lost. It got to the point where bookmakers refused to take bets from Führer.

Interestingly, the ATP fined Labadze $7,500 for lack of effort in one of those matches. It was a foreshadowing of the $2,000 fine Davydenko received for lack of effort at the St. Petersburg Open last year. Davydenko successfully appealed the fine.

Ings was the guy who set up an agreement with Betfair to notify the ATP whenever they found an irregular betting pattern. He also had access to Betfair’s database and he used it to research Führer’s bets. However, Ings left the ATP a few months later and the ATP never followed up on his findings.