CHENNAI: A young tennis player has a blood vessel burst in his head just days before turning professional. He wakes up after a six-month coma when he is told by doctors that he may never walk again. Undeterred, he makes his return, not only to life and but to the tennis court as well. Sounds too good to be true? Well, that’s because it is.
Darko Grncarov, a 21-year-old Macedonian tennis player who claimed to have made a comeback from a life-threatening medical condition, has been exposed as a fraud. Grncarov conned the who’s who of world tennis, one of the world’s biggest sports apparel companies and a number of reputed media houses, including this newspaper.
At one point, Grncarov was the toast of the tennis world. His tear-inducing back-story and his constant taking up of causes that mainstream players would diplomatically smile over had made an overnight star. He hit out at Tennys Sandgren when the American posted homophobic comments. He emphatically declared that he would never play on the Margaret Court Arena after the Australian icon claimed that ‘tennis was full of lesbians’.
Martina Navratilova tweeted good luck. Serena Williams started following him on Twitter. Adidas tweeted out ‘welcome to the tennis family, Darko’, though they later denied offering him a formal contract. The Metro did a piece on him that mentioned how fast his serve was (though no one had seen him play) while the BBC called him on for a 9-minute radio interview.
Then came the final act of the magic trick — the revelation. An article in The Slate revealed how Grncarov had conned everyone. The brief career he claimed he had was all smoke and mirrors. So was his magical recovery — the ITF website shows him as having entered and withdrawn from a tournament in Egypt during the period in which he claimed he was in a coma. His Instagram account also turned out to be fake. “Most show a man only from behind, or with his face obscured. Several of the videos were taken from the Instagram account of Cameron Henricy Trigolos, a junior player from Spain, including one in which you can clearly hear people speaking Spanish,” the article said.
His Twitter ‘fans’ though were his piece de resistance. Almost all of them were fake accounts. “These accounts often yammered about the same topics simultaneously, whether it was Darko’s crush on Nicole Scherzinger or his purported net worth of $1.5 million. Some even appeared to be designated haters, posting negative comments about Grncarov only for the other accounts to rally to his defense,” the article said.
It was the 2016 US Elections that first sparked debate about the dangers of fabricated news stories. The Grncarov saga is another reminder of how hard it is getting to recognise fiction masquerading as fact.