W
A
TCH IT! Technology in sport
VIDEO – W If you watch a video of past Wimbledon
www
imbledon 2008
.youtube.com/watc
tournaments you will see an extra official
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(the net-cord judge) who sat by the net
VIDEO – Players Challenge
gently holding the top of the net. Their job
www
.youtube.com/watc
h?v=Ak8GRRFBN5
was to judge whether or not the ball
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eature=related
touched the net when the players served.
The net-cord judge has now been replaced
by a sensor which is attached to the
centre of the net and sends a signal
directly to the umpires chair via an
earpiece. The umpire then makes the call
of ‘let’. This goes against the trend of
having extra officials (such as the fourth
official in football) as tennis has actually
reduced the number of officials through
the use of technology.
The Wimbledon Tennis Championships
also used to use a system called ‘Cyclops’
which judged whether or not serves were
T
ASK
in within the service box. This has been
replaced by ‘Hawk-Eye’ (also used very
g/en_
pare Wimbledon’s new
regularly in cricket) which tracks the
Com
t ‘retractable roof’
m
plan.h
h’
flight of the ball. Players are allowed to
centre cour
challenge any line decision and then a
http://aeltc.wimbledon.or
embley’s ‘arc
h replay shows whether the ball was in or
GB/about/guide/longter
tml#roof to W
out. Each player was allowed three
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embleystadium.com/buil
embley/thearc
www
challenges per set and if their challenge
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was successful it was not counted.
F
ootball Discussion
hnology to help
k’s
Should f
ootball use tec hael Ballac
ender
the of
ficials? Think of Mic
or
tuguese def
‘push’ on the P
hnology be
w could tec
ame?
bef
ore scoring. Ho
ules of the g
used to maintain the r
ootball is resisting
Wh
y do you think f hnology?
the use of tec
DISCUSSION
Wh
y would it be desirable to
ensure pla
y continues, ev
bad w
en in
eather? What other
exam
ples can be f
reg
ound
arding the design, or
updating, of spor
ting stadiums
or arenas whic
h mak
tec
es use of
hnological dev
elopments.
12 SPORT IQ 14-16 : SEPTEMBER 2008