The Wimbledon chief executive today insisted she is “confident” there will be no repeat of the Electronic Line Calling malfunction on Centre Court. But Sally Bolton could not explain why the technology was switched off during a fourth round match. “I don’t know – it was a mistake obviously,” said Sally Bolton. “I’m not sure it matters greatly exactly how it happened.”
The All England Club was forced to offer an apology late on Sunday night after the ball-tracking technology failed to work at a crucial stage of a fourth round tie. German official Nico Helmwerth ordered a crucial point to be replayed in the fourth round tie between Sonay Kartal and Anastasia Pavlyuchnenkova even though he later admitted the British player’s shot was out.
The Russian accused the German umpire of being “scared” to make a decision against “local” Sonay Kartal. For the first time this year human line judges have been replaced by automated line calling at SW19.
Bolton today insisted: “The ball tracking technology is working effectively, was working effectively.” And she laid the blame at the person who “deactivated’ the system and Helwerth for not making the correct call from the umpire’s chair.
“The electronic line calling system was working optimally,” she said. “The issue we had was human error in terms of the tracking system having been inadvertently deactivated, and then the chair umpire not being made aware of the fact that it had been deactivated. The issue was it was deactivated for a period of time on a portion of the court. But the way it works is that the camera tracking technology works in tandem with some humans, so the Hawk-eye operator and the review official and all those things have to function effectively for it to work.
“The chair umpire has primacy on court. So in an instance where the electronic line system goes down, the chair still has primacy to call the line. And I think in the incident you saw yesterday, you saw that he called a couple of those points out. He wasn’t informed that the system had been deactivated in error. When we got to the third call, he made the decision to stop. But the chair umpire has primacy on court, so that is the job of the chair umpire.”
Asked why the system was deactivated, Bolton said: “I don’t know – it was a mistake obviously. I wasn’t sat there, so I don’t know what happened. It was clearly deactivated in error, because you wouldn’t ordinarily deactivate a set of cameras mid match intentionally. But there is a process of activating and deactivating, because at the end of a match, when there’s no play happening, the court in between matches, the system is deactivated.”
Asked if the All England Club would make public what went wrong, she said: “Well, I’m not sure it matters greatly exactly how it happened. It’s important for us to understand that, in terms of making sure that our processes are robust and that this doesn’t happen again.”
Asked how The Championships would ensure the error would not happen again, Bolton said: “We’ve reviewed all of our systems and processes, so the first and most important thing to say is that the ball tracking system was working optimally, is working optimally, is providing a much more accurate form of tracking the lines. That’s not at odds here. A mistake was made by the humans as part of that system. So you know, in many ways, any mistakes you have, you learn from that, it gave us the opportunity to revisit all of those systems and processes and make sure that we’ve got those right. So I can be confident that our system is in the best shape it can possibly be at this stage.
“You wouldn’t expect me to go into the details of an individual but suffice to say we’ve made sure we’ve made amendments to our processes to ensure that we won’t have the same situation again. we have gone through the process of understanding the detail of that. So yes, I can be confident (it won’t happen again).”
Content Source: www.express.co.uk