Canada's Felix Auger-Aliassime plays a backhand against James Duckworth of Australia during their first round match on at Wimbledon.Hannah Peters/Getty Images
Wimbledon organizers pride themselves in honouring traditions such as an all-white dress code for players, strawberries and cream, and a well ordered queue for daily tickets. But when matches got under way on Monday, one long-standing institution had been scrapped; line judges.
Fans no longer heard in-person shouts of “Out!” or waited eagerly to watch video replays when players challenged calls. Instead, the crew of sharply dressed men and women in Ralph Lauren blazers, blue pinstriped shirts and white pants, had been replaced by cameras and recorded voices.
The change did not go over well with some fans who missed the human touch, and sounds.
“Without the lines people, it loses a bit of the magic,” said Blake Adams after he watched Canada’s Carson Branstine lose to Aryna Sabalenka on Monday. “I was really surprised when I heard they were doing that.”
“Getting rid of them is terrible,” said his friend Brianna Harris. “When you think of Wimbledon, you think of tradition.”
Wimbledon’s chief executive Sally Bolton acknowledged that the change will take getting used to, but she said most major tournaments — including the U.S. Open and Australian Open — have adopted electronic line calling or ELC.
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“It’ll be a little bit different,” she told reporters on Monday. The decision was “very much about the way in which Wimbledon has always balanced heritage and tradition with innovation, and how we walk that line,” she added. “For us, it was time to make that change.”
Wimbledon used to employ 300 line judges during the tournament and as many as nine worked each match. They earned around £200 a day, or $374, plus expenses, and kept the natty uniforms.
Now 18 cameras do the work for them at each court.
The system has been developed by Britain’s Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd., a division of the Sony Group, which developed the first specialized cameras that allowed players to challenge line calls and foot faults. Video replays of questionable line judge decisions became a highlight of most matches and fans often rhythmically clapped while waiting to view the results.
The computer-assisted cameras surrounding the court now track the ball’s movements and emit a human-sounding call within a tenth of a second. A video operator monitors the system from a nearby room and chair umpires enforce the rules. Around 80 former line judges have been kept on hand as match assistance, but their role has been greatly reduced.
Bolton said the calls made by the computer are recordings of staff members. “The voices are a range of voices from colleagues that work here at the championship. So we will still hear different voices around the grounds. We just won’t see them on court,” she said.
Line judging cameras are a new feature at Wimbledon, with the tournament shifting away from human line judges for the first time. The move has received a mixed reaction from fans.Toby Melville/Reuters
A couple of protesters, dressed as line judges, signalled their opposition to ELC and staged a small demonstration outside the grounds on Monday, holding signs that read “Game Set Match A.I.” and “Don’t Let Bots Call the Shots”.
“The whole idea that these things can be replaced by machines is worrying, it is a wider problem,” one of the protesters, Harry Robson, 27, told the Daily Mail.
Most players seem to be largely on board with the move, although there have been problems with the technology at some tournaments. The French Open has also stuck with human line judges for now.
“I like the electronic system,” Germany’s Alexander Zverev said on Saturday. “All in all, I do think it makes the game more fair. I think there’s no mistakes happening any more.”
Italy’s Lorenzo Musetti was more circumspect. “I think it’s going to look a little bit strange because, of course, we have an enormous tradition here in Wimbledon,” he said, before adding that “the elegance that was showed by the line umpires here in Wimbledon, was such a traditional thing, historical thing.”
Nonetheless, he too welcomed the move to automation. “It’s really tough to judge, especially right now, the ball is going really fast. In the modern days, I think we will need more help from the technology. [I] agree [with] this change, especially here on grass,” he said Saturday.
Ben McKiddie said he stopped noticing the absence of line judges as he watched Monday’s match between Branstine and Sabalenka. “I knew there wasn’t going to be any line judges, but I forgot about it. You can still hear the call, and if you were not paying attention, you could think there was a line judge there,” he said.
McKiddie misses the excitement of players contesting calls, but believes the game is better off with less chance of human error. “Overall, you don’t want the line judges to be involved in the match, just the players.”
Some fans like Flavia Franco were undecided about the change. “It takes away a bit of that old school style,” she said as she waited for the start of a match between Brazil’s Joao Fonseca and Jacob Fearnley of Britain.
“But it’s nice to be sure.”