Andy Murray, who won $5.7 million last year and has already amassed $1.39m in 2013, is adamant he would be prepared to take a reduction in prize money to help finance a state-of-the-art anti-doping program that will determine tennis doesn’t fall into the same trap as cycling and is clean from of banned performance enhancing drugs.
The world no.3 is insistent prize funds on offer to players at all leading events should be cut in order to boost tennis’ anti-doping budget, which last year amounted to little more than $1.8 million. Last month’s Australian Open offered a record prize fund of $ Aus 30 million ($31.25m). Murray believes the he and his fellow leading players such as Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, should exert more pressure on the International Tennis Federation, that adheres to the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) code to invest more into drug detection.
“Maybe it’s down to our governing bodies, the ATP World Tour, to invest some of our own money into WADA and into making sure we get more testing done,” said Murray. “That’s the only way you can improve your testing procedures; by having more of them, more blood testing. “In the long term I think you would save a lot of money because more people would come to watch sports rather than reading all the time about doping or match-fixing scandals. Every single week right now there’s something different.
