Wimbledon Goes Automated

When you think of tennis, you probably think of Wimbledon, the All England Club’s famous competition that has run for 147 years. Part of that history has always been line judges who call the ball in or out, sometimes to the ire of players and fans alike. But line judges will be no more at Wimbledon. They are moving to ELC or electronic line calling on all courts in both the main draw and the qualifying tournaments, according to [Tumaini Carayol] writing in The Guardian.

Of course, in 2007, the competition started using “Hawk-Eye,” which allows for review and challenges of the calls. ELC has also been used in other venues, such as the US Open, which has also done away with all line judges.

In fact, the only grand slam tournament that isn’t using ELC now is the French Open. There is some concern, however. The increased availability of line judges will cut down on the demand for new line judges at lesser tournaments. However, these jobs are a common pathway for aspiring chair judges to gain experience and exposure.

According to the Bloomberg video below, the system uses cameras and microphones to keep track of the ball’s position. Other reports say there are 18 cameras and, apparently, the system uses a computer-generated voice to call “out,” “fault,” or “foot fault.”

Apparently, there are some downsides, however. Last month at the US Open, play was halted because the remote office of the technicians operating the ELC system had to evacuate due to a fire alarm.

[Lewin Day] thinks tech will ruin sports. He may be right. Of course, we are more likely to play sports on technology.

Title image from [matt4395] via Pixabay.

4 thoughts on “Wimbledon Goes Automated

  1. It is Big Money that is ruining sports, admittedly less so when tennis is concerned. Technology might help if the referees are crooked or incompetent (and when they are, they usually err in favour of Big Money) but again, Wimbledon line judges aren’t too guilty of that. On the other hand, that ref from Panama that helped USA beat Serbia in the Olympic basketball semifinals probably won’t be replaced by technology anytime soon. Technology can be useful to help the refs decide when in doubt – even if they refuse to use it when crooked – and it would be nice if it could assist the supervisors in keeping the refs in check. But I’m afraid that people who boss the competitions aren’t always a model of honesty themselves and these new rules will probably be used for whitewashing their corruption, making it look like the everything is fair on the court when behind it nothing is (again, tennis is probably the least guilty of this but it’s very much true for other sports like football or basketball).

    1. Wimbledon is giving out over 60 million dollars in prizes for the players this year. So I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say there is a lot of money in tennis. Beyond that it is well known how crazy some line judge rulings can be. Accidentally hit line judge, disqualification.

      To sit there and be like, see it is better to have these meat sacks who can arbitrarily decide to swing matches by making bad calls is better then the mythical dark horse of maybe the image processing isn’t fair.

      Now as for the ever present “big money is evil” boogyman. Why? Do you think if there was no money in tennis these tournaments would exist and be broadcast at the scale they are today? Do you think the players would practice as hard to perform as well? Money is driving the advancement of the sport, the only counter to that is the fact that certain tennis rackets are against the rules because they are to good.

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