20 years of Hawk-Eye
Sports have historically been officiated by human, in-person referees. As time progresses, they have adapted and started introducing technology to make close calls easier to decide. American football and basketball notoriously utilize replays to make close calls, football (soccer) introduced the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) within the past 5 years, but tennis and cricket have been using their own technology for much longer, two decades.
What is Hawk-Eye?
Hawk-Eye was created by Dr. Paul Hawkins, who was at the time a young British cricket enthusiast and doctor of artificial intelligence.
He started creating the technology in 1999 and by 2001 it was introduced into cricket.
The ball-tracking technology uses a series of cameras to track the path of the ball and generate a 3D image of where the ball landed.
According to the Hawk-Eye, every year the technology covers 20,000 games or events across 500+ stadiums in over 90 countries.
While it has become most prominently known for its use in tennis, Hawk-Eye debuted on May 21, 2001 during a cricket match between England and Pakistan.
Decisions in cricket were traditionally decided by the field umpire but the introduction of the decision review system sought to change that.
Before Hawk-Eye
In the age before Hawk-Eye, tennis matches were officiated solely by line judges who screamed “out” when the ball was out. In a sport where points are gained and lost based on the ball’s placement, the technology was not met with much backlash, unlike introductive technologies in other sports such as VAR in football.
While referees are still required to officiate for the duration of the match, new Hawk-Eye rules have been integrated into tennis. In each set, players can challenge two calls they believe were wrongly called. If the challenge is successful, the player gets their challenge back, and thus retains the same number of challenges they had left — and if the challenge is unsuccessful, they lose one available challenge until they have none remaining.
The technology has been a part of professional tennis for the good part of two decades but its use has never stagnated and it continues to be the topic of conversation within the tennis world.
A Solution to a Contemporary Problem
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hawk-Eye was used even more often than simply for challenges. The technology allowed tournaments such as the U.S. Open to minimize the number of people on the court during matches. Organizers opted to use it to make essentially every in or out call during the match and the only person needed on-site was a single referee who would verbalize what the technology called.
At the 2021 Australian Open, players like Naomi Osaka, Dominic Thiem, and Novak Djokovic voiced their support for the technology’s increased use.
“No offense at all, but there are just no mistakes happening, and that’s really good in my opinion,” Thiem said. “If the electronic call is out, the ball is out, so there’s no room for mistakes. I like it.”
While many tennis pros and fans appear to be in support of the technology’s growing use, there have been inevitable complaints surrounding mechanization and how people are losing jobs because of a rapidly changing digital world.
Despite few complaints, it appears Hawk-Eye will continue to cement itself as one of the sports world’s most seamlessly adopted pieces of technology. It has spent 20 years making tennis and cricket, among other sports, fairer and easier to officiate.
