Hold My Pimms! Wimbledon Turns To Tech For Line-ball Calls

The All England Lawn Tennis Club, organizer of the famed Wimbledon tennis tournament, will make line-ball calls with machines instead of human in 2025.

The club on Wednesday revealed that Live Electronic Line Calling (Live ELC) tech “will be adopted at The Championships from 2025: and trusted to make “‘out’ and ‘fault’ calls that have previously been made by line umpires.”

Live ELC will be used on all courts – even the lowly ones employed for qualifying matches.

“Having reviewed the results of the testing undertaken at The Championships this year, we consider the technology to be sufficiently robust and the time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating,” stated club chief executive Sally Bolton, who added that the tech is already used at other tournaments and players will appreciate a consistent experience.

Bolton’s also quoted as saying “We take our responsibility to balance tradition and innovation at Wimbledon very seriously. Line umpires have played a central role in our officiating set-up at The Championships for many decades and we recognise their valuable contribution and thank them for their commitment and service.”

They’re just not wanted any more.

In their place, the Club will use ball-tracking tech from Hawk-Eye innovations, whose owner Sony describes the tech as follows:

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In this video, Hawkeye shows off what its cameras capture. It’s worth a look as the close-up vision of a tennis ball skidding for quite a distance is not perceptible with the human eye.

Which is where things get awkward, because as Bolton said tradition is a big part of Wimbledon, or “The Championship” to use its formal name. Indeed, the tournament is famed for its many rituals on and off the court such as serving strawberries and cream, cocktails made with Pimms, and offering tradeable debentures that guarantee seats rather than a more conventional membership scheme.

Human line judges are another tradition that has lasted over a century, as has a certain British attitude towards fair play. But at a time when sports fans expect to see the minutiae of every contest, adjudication errors can go viral and light up millions of smartphones, meaning certainty that a decision was correct is increasingly expected.

Line judges are therefore a victim of many technologies, not just the kit that will replace them at Wimbledon. ®