Babe of the Month - Russian Beauty Elena Vesnina

Elena Sergeyevna Vesnina was born on 1st August 1986 in Lviv, Ukraine and represents Russia as a professional tennis player.

When Lena was 6 years old, her mother Irina took her daughter to the Sochi tennis school under the guidance of the late Yury Yudkin, who was also Maria Sharapova's first tennis mentor in the early 1990's.

In October 2002, aged 16 years and two months, she gained direct entry into the qualifying draw for her first $10,000 tournament at Giza, Egypt, and succeeded in qualifying for the main draw.

Her career-high rankings are World No. 13 in singles (March 2017) and World No. 3 in doubles (June 2017).

Vesnina is a three-time Grand Slam champion in doubles competition, having won the 2013 French Open and the 2014 US Open tournaments with Ekaterina Makarova, and the 2016 Australian Open mixed doubles title with Bruno Soares.

Representing Russia in the 2007 Fed Cup final against Italy, Elena defeated Mara Santangelo in straight sets. In the 2008 Fed Cup final Ekaterina Makarova made her debut in the doubles match with Vesina winning their doubles match as Russia confidently defeated Spain 4–0.

Vesnina participated in the 2009 ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand in January. It was here that she advanced to her first final on the WTA Tour, upsetting the tournament's sixth-seed Nicole Vaidišová in the second round and the second-seed Caroline Wozniacki in the quarter-finals along the way. She then prevailed in a marathon semi-final against British No.1 Anne Keothavong with a score of to set up a meeting with fellow Russian and tournament first-seed Elena Dementieva in the Final.
She started strongly in the match with a 3–1 lead but eventually lost to Dementieva.

In 2009 Elena reached her first Grand Slam final in the doubles at the French Open partnering Victoria Azarenka. The pair were seeded 12th but lost in the final to the 3rd seeds and defending champions Virginia Ruano Pascual and Anabel Medina Garrigues.

In 2010 At the Wimbledon Championships Vesnina made it to her second Grand Slam final in doubles while partnering Vera Zvonareva. The pair scored some impressive wins over the top seeded Williams Sisters in the Quarter finals (which ended the Americans 27 match winning streak in Grand Slam doubles matches) and over 4th seeds Gisela Dulko and Flavia Pennetta in the semifinals. In the final they fell to fellow unseeded pairing Yaroslava Shvedova and Vania King.

In doubles in 2011, Vesnina along with Sania Mirza won the finals of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California by defeating Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Meghann Shaughnessy. Then the pair won their second doubles title of the year at the Family Circle Cup in Charleston, South Carolina by defeating Mattek-Sands and Shaughnessy again.

Together with Leander Paes, she reached the 2012 Australian Open and the Wimbledon Mixed Doubles finals.

In 2013 Vesnina won her second WTA tour title at the Aegon International in Eastbourne. En route to the final, she defeated Ana Ivanovic in the first round and Heather Watson in the second. She then went on to beat second seed Li Na in the quarter-finals and Yanina Wickmayer in the semi-finals. In the final, she easily dispatched American Jamie Hampton to win her first grass tour event (above).

Vesnina and Makarova won their second major doubles title at the 2014 US Open.

In 2015 the pair reached the Wimbledon Doubles final, but lost to longtime-rivals Hingis/Mirza.

At Wimbledon last year, Elena competed in her first Grand Slam Singles semi-final with straight set victories over Tamira Paszek, Andrea Petkovic, and Julia Boserup in the first three rounds before outlasting good friend and doubles partner Makarova in three sets to advance to her first slam quarter-final. She then easily defeated Slovak Dominika Cibulkova to continue her resurgence into the semi-finals where she was was defeated by World No.1 and eventual champion Serena Williams.

At the start of 2016 at the Australian Open, Elena Vesnina and partner Bruno Soares reached the Mixed Doubles final where they defeated Coco Vandeweghe and Horia Tecău, which marked her first mixed doubles Grand Slam title.

In July 2016 Elena and Ekaterina won their first tournament title at the Rogers Cup in Montréal, Canada, and then they went on to win a gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Rio for Russia a few weeks later - this was the very first time that any Russian duo had won an Olympic doubles event.

2017 began well for Vesnina. At Indian Wells in March and seeded 14th, Vesnina defeated Shelby Rogers and Timea Babos to set-up a fourth round meeting with Angelique Kerber, who was guaranteed to return to world no.1 at the end of the tournament. Vesnina beat the US Open champion, before defeating Australian Open runner-up Venus Williams and the in-form Kristina Mladenovic to reach her first Premier Mandatory final. In an all-Russian final against Svetlana Kuznetsova, Vesnina came from a set down to win her 3rd WTA singles title, her first since 2013 and the biggest of her career so far, in just over three hours. With this victory, Vesnina climbed to a career high ranking of 13.

Overall Elena's career stats show: 3 WTA (Women's Tennis Association) Singles wins and a Wimbledon Singles Grand Slam semi-final, 15 WTA Doubles victories, 2 Grand Slam Double titles and an Olympic Doubles Gold Medal, along with a Grand Slam Mixed Doubles title.

To date Elena has won in career prize money alone, somewhere in the region of US$ 8.6 million.

Elena is seeded number 15 in the 2017 Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championships, and number 2 in the Wimbledon Ladies Doubles with Ekaterina Makarova, which begin next week.

You can follow Elena on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Betting Scams - Rigging Football Matches

Upton Park, 4th November 1997, Crystal Palace are leading West Ham United 2-1 when in the 65th minute Frank Lampard collects the ball on the edge of the penalty area and drills home a well-earned equaliser.

Seconds later, as the West Ham players celebrate, the ground decends into darkness as, inexplicably, the floodlighs fail.
A quarter of an hour later, two of the floodlights on the North Stand flicker into life before going out once more. With the ground in darkness the referee David Elleray has no option but to abandon the game.

A month later at Selhurst Park, Wimbledon (who were ground sharing with Crystal Palace at the time) were holding Arsenal to a draw, when precisely the same thing occurred. Selhurst Park's floodlights died after just 13 seconds of the second half. On this occasion, engineers managed to restart them just 12 minutes later, only for them to go out again - this time permanently - while the players were warming up to go back on. Referee Dermot Gallagher immediately called the game off.

Again, nobody had the faintest notion of what happened. No one suspected anything suspicious, after all electrical problems did happen, and in the darkness fixing them quickly was almost impossible, so there was no option but to abandon the matches. So the blame was laid squarely at the feet of shoddy maintenance and dodgy wiring.

It would be two years before police finally uncovered what really occurred during those games and, when they did, they found a scam so devious that it stood to make the operators millions of pounds whenever they felt like putting it into practice!

The man behind it was Wai Yuen Liu, who Police suspected of having links with the Triad gangs of Hong Kong. Based in London, Liu was a notorious gambler and convicted credit card fraudster, and was the first point of contact for the syndicates in the Far East. With the help of two Malaysian henchmen, Liu set about targeting games that would reap the biggest dividends for the syndicate back home.

After their successes at Upton Park and Selhurst Park, the gang set about rigging the Premiership game between Charlton and Liverpool at The Valley. But first they needed a a contact at the ground.
They eventually approached Roger Firth, a 49 year-old security guard who had been working there for four years. With the promise of £20,000 in cash for his co-operation, the syndicate had now secured guaranteed access to the ground's power supply.
It only took a couple of hours to install a device capable of picking up a radio signal into the circuit controlling the flow of power to the lights. The device could then be used to switch off the lights using a hand-held remote control, similar to that used to open and close garage doors.

Under British betting rules, a match is considered void and all stakes are returned if it does not reach full-time. The crucial difference in betting legislation in the Far East is that if the game is abandoned after half-time, the result at the time of abandonment stands as the final score........and this is how the syndicate planned to make their millions, by stopping games in the second-half, when the scoreline stood at a point which would allow them to make the most possible money.

The syndicate's activities may have remained undetected, but for a loss of nerve on the part of security guard Firth. Firth still feared officials at The Valley might rumble the gang, and things fell apart when he tried to bribe another security guard. It was the man Firth tried to bribe that contacted the police.

As their investigation progressed, the police discovered a working remote control device in the car used by the men at Charlton and a further eight devices in their possession. The idea that 11 matches - each capable at the time of generating up to £30million - could be interfered with, gives you some idea of the kind of money they stood to make.

When the case came to trial in August 1999, Chee Kew Ong, a Malaysian businessman and Ena Hwa Lim, a Malaysian electronics engineer were both sentenced to four years imprisonment, while Wai Yuen Liu received a 30 month sentence. Roger Firth meanwhile, got 18 months.

Although it affected Asian betting, it thankfully left no slur or question mark on English football, and precautions were put in place to ensure it couldn’t happen again. It must be said, the Malaysian syndicate did not at any point make any attempt to subvert players to influence the scores.