The singles final in last week’s ITF M15 Antalya event was washed out by rain. It went in the books as a walkover victory for Giovanni Fonio over Juan Manuel Cerundolo. Doubles specialist Harri Heliovaara explains (from the Finnish, via Google translate, via Peter Wetz):
Namely, the ITF competitions were also played here last week, and the men’s final scheduled for Sunday of that competition could not be played at all due to the rain. Normally in that situation, each player only gets the ATP points and prize money of the losing finalist, but now the players threw themselves creatively and decided to decide the final winner with a coin toss. They agreed that the winner of the coin toss would receive a surrender win and thus the winner’s ATP points, while the loser would receive the winner’s prize money, so each received more than what would have resulted from not playing the final anyway.
This is indeed a clever solution, and one that was sometimes employed in the amateur era. When grass courts made up a bigger part of the tour and court maintenance in general was more primitive, it was more common for the tail end of events to be left unplayed. Usually the finalists (or semifinalists, in extreme cases) divided the prizes, but occasionally they resorted to a coin toss, especially in mixed doubles, which has always had a bit of an “exhibition” vibe.
While Fonio and Cerundolo benefited (in different ways) from the coin flip, parts of this scenario don’t quite smell right to me. First I’ll explain why, then I’ll offer a solution.
- The winning player gave his prize money to the loser. Change the context a tiny bit, and that’s match fixing.
- The ITF doesn’t have a provision in their rulebook for coin-flipping (as far as I know), so this solution only worked because the losing player agreed to claim an injury. Again, this is an unusual situation, but attesting to a fake injury is frowned upon, to say the least.
- Fonio gets some extra ranking points. Typically when tournaments are washed out, those points aren’t awarded, so it isn’t as if there is a precedent that Fonio or Cerundolo “deserved” those points. Instead, Fonio gains an unearned edge (albeit a small one) over several similarly-ranked players, who are presumably competing for entry and seeding in the same events.
- Players in other unfinished events–such as the Nur Sultan and Potchefstroom Challengers that were halted due to Covid-19 last March–didn’t get a chance to divide the unawarded points, by coin-flipping or any other method.
We can collapse these four points into two issues: First, there’s no ITF rule, so swapping points for prize money requires treading very close to some ethical and rule-breaking lines. Second, allowing players to improvise (sometimes? depending on the attitude of the on-site supervisor? I don’t know) inevitably gives an unearned advantage to some players over others.
Edit the rulebook
Fortunately, this is an easy fix. By providing a simple guideline for situations like this, the ITF can avoid the iffy behavior of prize-swapping and lying about injuries, ensure fairness for players across the whole tour, and do a better job of delivering the rewards that players expect when they show up for a tournament.
How about this:
Matches that cannot be played due to weather or force majeure will be decided by a coin flip, with ranking points awarded to the winner.
I’m not a lawyer, so my one-liner is probably missing a few paragraphs, but the main idea is pretty straightforward.
Prize money is trickier. Should anyone–“winner” or “loser”–receive prize money for unplayed matches? I don’t know. Tournaments–even the occasional ITF–earn revenue from ticket sales and broadcast rights, so they would surely prefer to hold back prize money from unplayed matches. On the other hand, players spend money and travel to events with the expectation that certain rewards are on offer.
Reap the benefits
The biggest gain in establishing this rule is consistency. As fans, we expect that sporting bodies treat players equally, and at the moment, handling unplayable matches is a real (if rare) source of inconsistency.
The other benefit is in guaranteeing at least some of what competitors have been promised. In several past articles, I’ve used metrics such as “expected points” to quantify how a player can expect to perform at a tournament. If he has a 50% chance of reaching the second round, he has a 50% chance of earning those points; if he has a 15% chance of winning the tournament, he has a 15% chance of earning those additional points. Most players don’t explicitly choose tournaments by predicting exact draws and calculating expected points, but many–including Heliovaara, incidentally–very much think in these terms.
If a tournament is forced to end early, those calculations–explicit or not–are worthless. As a qualifier and the fifth seed, respectively, Fonio and Cerundolo probably would’ve been happy with finalist points in Antalya. But what about the players who ended up making trips to Kazakhstan and South Africa last March for nothing better than quarter-finalist points?
As I’ve said above, we can debate whether tournaments should be expected to pay out prize money (and whether prize money should go to the coin-flip losers, as it did in Antalya), but there’s no reason for a similar dispute about ranking points. Sure, some players would get lucky in that a coin proclaims them the winner, but it’s not much different from finding oneself the beneficiary of a withdrawal, or even in a weak section of the draw.
Fonio and Cerundolo ended up with the right solution, and I’m glad the tournament supervisor didn’t stand in the way. I just wish the coin flip were standard practice, to avoid the ethical tightrope walk. I’m sure that players would appreciate the increased clarity, as well.