When US sprinter Noah Lyles pipped his Jamaican rival Kishane Thompson to the 100 metres gold medal in Paris this summer, five thousandths of a second separated the two men. The race was the closest in Olympic history — yet the outcome was known almost instantly, thanks to new cameras able to capture and process 40,000 images a second.
And this is just one of the many advances that have been made in determining outcomes in sport. Although referees, umpires and judges have always been the ultimate arbiters of the sporting rule book, technology has long had a part to play. The London Olympics in 1948 featured the first use of photo finish cameras while, at the Mexico City games 20 years later, electronic timekeeping became standard across all Olympic sports.
In recent years, advances in both software and hardware have brought increased automation into officiating. In football, goal-line technology, which instantly determines whether a goal has been scored, made its debut during the 2012 Club World Cup, while semi-automated offsides were rolled out during the group stages of the Uefa Champions League a decade later.
Now, many in the industry believe a new technological revolution in sport is under way that will lead to more on-field decisions being made or informed by automated systems, rather than human beings alone.
At the Paris Olympics, Swiss Timing — which, through its sister company Omega, has links to the games going back to its role as timekeeper in Los Angeles, 1932 — introduced a new system for diving. It was able to track the distance between a high diver’s head and the diving board — information that judges could use to determine whether a jump had been executed safely, or whether to impose a points penalty.
Alain Zobrist, chief executive of Swiss Timing, says breakthroughs in visual data-collection and processing speed have opened up a world of new possibilities.
“We can track both athletes’ performance or body movement in a very, very accurate way, something that we couldn’t do before,” he says. “There’s a potential in some sports where technology — automated technology — could be the decision maker.”
In a further sign of the changing times, at next summer’s Wimbledon tennis championships line judges will no longer appear courtside. The oldest of the four tennis Grand Slams has made the decision to replace its human line judges with a fully automated ball tracking system, marking the end of an era that had lasted for more than a century.
Hawk-Eye, which developed the electronic line call system, has been providing officiating technology to Wimbledon since 2007. The UK-based company is owned by Sony Sports, and now works with 23 of the top 25 sports leagues in the world. It recently announced a joint venture with Fifa, football’s global governing body, to build a technology centre to explore how algorithms can help improve on-field decision making by referees.
Rufus Hack, chief executive of Sony Sports, says that the advance of technology in elite sports is likely to be gradual, even as recent breakthroughs in areas such as skeletal tracking and machine learning open the door to new applications.
“Ultimately, the long term direction of travel, I think, is to have more technology in sports,” Hack says. “I think most people recognise that it is faster and fairer and more objective than the humans making decisions. But it has to be done in a phased and thoughtful way.”
Progress could be quicker in rolling out technology that is already used at elite level to lower leagues and even grassroots sports, he adds. And existing systems are being improved. For example, when automated offside technology was first deployed, it took 90 seconds to reach a verdict. Now, that wait has been cut to one second.
Genius Sport, which provides semi-automated offside technology to the English Premier League, initially developed much of its technology to help teams, leagues and broadcasters track performance and generate live data. Capturing players’ movements and biometric data, for example, can help to identify when tiredness is beginning to take its toll, or if a tactical change by the opposing team requires a response.
But being able to track and analyse an increasing number of points on a single athlete’s body has quickly led to applications in officiating. Matt Fleckenstein, chief product officer at Genius, points to advances in several areas, including camera technology and data processing, that have made it easier to build systems to help enforce the rules.
For example, it is possible to track up to 10,000 points on an athlete’s body during a live match, information that can be used to build a 3D model of the action on the field. That, in turn, can determine where players are in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the ball, and the lines on the field. That makes it possible to measure simple decisions such as offsides almost instantly, and help human beings making decisions on the pitch, such as whether a ball is in play. But, in the future, the potential applications could go much further.
“It’s about helping an official get to a better outcome in a faster period of time. And then, I think, you’ll see those more complex use cases mature at some point down the road,” says Fleckenstein. “Whether it’s 10 years, or 15 years, who knows? They’ll mature into being probably fully automated, like what we’re starting to see with line calls in tennis.”
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