Argentine tennis player Hernán Casanova, No. 397 in the ATP rankings, was suspended for two months by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) for placing sports bets and for failing to report an attempted match-fixing approach. The ITIA sanction comes less than a week after the final of the Challenger 125 tournament in Rosario, Argentina, where Argentine Román Burruchaga and Spain’s Nikolas Sánchez Izquierdo reported death threats allegedly from gamblers urging them to lose their matches.
“I’m going to be suspended for two months,” Casanova wrote Friday on his Instagram account, where he defended himself, saying he made “two mistakes” because he “didn’t know the rules exactly.” The 32-year-old player, who reached his best position in the world rankings in 2022 at No. 221, admitted that he bet “for fun” on numerous matches in tournaments in which he was not competing between 2023 and 2025, an infraction of the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program (TACP) under the ITIA.
He also did not report an approach with an apparent intention to “fix a match,” Casanova acknowledged. “I clearly accepted my mistake and suspension,” he said. The tennis player must also pay a $500 fine and will not be able to play, train, or enter any tournament until April 3.
“These are going to be two difficult months (…) I want to share this so that the kids who are just starting out in professional tennis read and get well informed about the anti-corruption program, because the smallest mistake comes at a cost,” Casanova added. His last match was a 1-6, 0-2 loss and retirement against Taiwan’s Chun-Hsin Tseng in the first round of the Rosario Challenger.
The Argentine competition was marked by the shadow of gamblers. Román Burruchaga revealed Tuesday that he was threatened ahead of playing the semifinals against Tseng. Despite that, the local player won and reached the final.
At the same event, Spain’s Sánchez Izquierdo received threats from an alleged illegal betting network minutes before his second-round match against Argentine Valerio Aboian, to whom he lost in straight sets.
