Beware of Counterfeit Babolat Tennis Racquets. I recently purchased a Babolat AeroPro Drive tennis racquet on ebay and when I took the racquet to my local pro for stringing, he took one look at it and informed me it was a fake. He related that he'd seen several fake Babolat AeroPro Drive and Pure Drive racquets of late that had been purchased on ebay. This pro is an authorized Babolat dealer, so we got one of his genuine racquets and compared it to mine. There were numerous cosmetic differences as well as length, weight, and balance. But the really huge difference was stiffness. We used his Babolat machine to test for stiffness and the genuine checked out at R.A.72, and the counterfeit at 57! He told me he had strung several of the fake racquets and the frames actually broke after a few hits! This could be a safety concern.

I've contacted Babolat and they tell me there are ways to check the racquets cosmetically to see if they are genuine. The genuine racquet should have a "TM" mark next to the "Babolat" name on the throat. The grip is not perforated and the shrink wrap on a new racquet should have a barcode sticker and a color-coded sticker indicating grip size. The blue color on the frame head is a teal color on the fake, and a richer blue on the genuine racquet. There should be a bar code sticker inside the throat, and other differences too numerous to mention here. But of course, a dishonest seller could take a photo of the genuine article for their listing, then ship the fake. I was lucky in the fact that the seller refunded my money, and I'll leave his name out of this article, but others might not fair as well. I'm not even sure sellers are aware they have fake merchandise.

I'm writing this guide in the hope that others will not be harmed or duped, and in the hope that sellers will check their stock for fakes and not attempt to pass them off as the genuine article.