This year, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) tested Electronic Line-Calling (ELC) during the Wimbledon Championships. This decision has opened up the floodgates for highly contentious and emotional discourse between players and fans alike. ELC uses new automated ball-tracking technology, boosted by AI, to radically cut collision risk by replacing court line judges. The rollout has drawn the ire of some of the tourney’s biggest stars in the wake of their upsets.
During these first eight days of the tournament, the AELTC continued to proudly stand by their ELC system. This shift was largely in reaction to increasing pressure from hostile critics. After their respective matches on Saturday, British No. 1 players Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu shared their displeasure with the system’s performance on display. Raducanu particularly pinpointed challenges with accuracy, explaining that she has been disheartened by inaccurate calls.
“It’s kind of disappointing, the tournament here, that the calls can be so wrong, but for the most part they’ve been OK. It’s just, like, I’ve had a few in my other matches, too, that have been very wrong.” – Emma Raducanu
Sally Bolton, the chief executive of Wimbledon, took the fight to the critics. She claimed that if the ELC system did make an error, it was out of human mistake. To avoid similar accidents in the future, she promised that protocols would be changed.
A big controversy erupted when one of the system operators inadvertently turned off ELC on Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova’s side of the court. This blunder immediately became the talk of the game. This failure raised fresh questions about the technology’s reliability. It raised serious doubts over its capacity to deliver the same level of accuracy across an entire game.
Even with these hurdles, the AELTC insists that ELC provides greater consistency and accuracy than line judges. According to Hawk-Eye, the company that developed the ball-tracking technology, it has a 2.2 mm margin of error. This precision makes the technology drastically more accurate. An enhanced level of precision that far exceeds the capabilities of human line judges.
The introduction of ELC at Wimbledon is a seismic cultural shift in how professional tennis is being officiated. It replaced around 300 linesmen and women, which has led to a more sterile environment on court, with some fans lamenting the loss of human touch in officiating. Tennis purists decry this trend as a move away from the staid, decorous environment that’s been part of the game for generations.
ELC’s debut appearance at the Next Gen ATP Finals of 2018. Since then, it has slowly but surely caught on in the sport’s top ranks. We’ve written before on how four years ago the Australian Open was the first Grand Slam to put this technology in place. Now, the ATP is rolling out ELC at every one of its events this year. With the French Open, for now, still the only Grand Slam to still be using human line judges.
Debbie Jevans, a former CEO of the USTA and a former tennis administrator, expressed her concern and pointed to the irony in the present day. She pointed out that there used to be a big interest in creating an electronic line-calling system. Fans thought it was less biased and more objective than human officiating.
“It’s funny, because when we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn’t have electronic line-calling because it’s more accurate.” – Debbie Jevans
Now that Wimbledon is implementing its ELC system, reactions have varied from supportive to enthusiastic to outright critical. Only time will tell how this technology will progress in upcoming tournaments and if it will be more broadly accepted by players and fans alike.