LONDON — The All England Club, somewhat ironically, is blaming ''human error'' for a glaring mistake by the electronic system that replaced human line judges this year at Wimbledon.
The CEO of the club, Sally Bolton, said Monday that the technology was "inadvertently deactivated" by someone for three points at Centre Court during Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova's three-set victory over Sonay Kartal a day earlier in the fourth round. On one point, a shot by Kartal clearly landed past the baseline but wasn't called out by the automated setup — called Hawk-Eye — because it had been shut off.
Hours after Bolton spoke with reporters, the club issued a statement to announce that it ''removed the ability for Hawk-Eye operators to manually deactivate the ball tracking,'' meaning ''this error cannot now be repeated due to the system changes we have made.''
Bolton declined to say who made the mistake on Sunday or how, exactly, it occurred or whether that person would face any consequences or be re-trained. She did note that there were other people at fault: the chair umpire, Nico Helwerth, and two who should have let him know the system was temporarily down — the review official and the Hawk-Eye official.
''We didn't need to put line judges back on the court again,'' Bolton said. ''We needed the system to be active.''
Is Wimbledon using AI for line calls this year?
No. But like most big tennis tournaments nowadays — the French Open is one notable exception — Wimbledon has replaced its line judges with cameras that are supposed to follow the balls on every shot to determine whether they land in or out.
There are those, particularly in the British media, who keep referring to this as part of the ever-increasing creep of artificial intelligence into day-to-day life, but Bolton objected to the use of that term in this case.
