When American sprinter Noah Lyles overcame his Jamaican rival Kishane Thompson to win the 100-meter 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 result was known almost instantly, thanks to new cameras capable of capturing and processing 40,000 images per second.
And this is just one of the many advances made in determining results in sport. While referees, judges and officials have always had the final say in the sports rulebook, technology has long played a role. The London Olympics in 1948 featured the first use of photofinish cameras, while at the Mexico City Games 20 years later electronic timing became standard across all Olympic sports.
In recent years, advances in both software and hardware have brought greater automation to arbitration. In football, goal technology, which instantly determines whether the ball has gone in, made its debut during the 2012 Club World Cup, while semi-automatic offsides were implemented during the group stages of the UEFA Champions League a decade later.
Now, many in the industry believe that a new technological revolution in sport is underway that will lead to more on-field decisions being made or informed by automated systems rather than just humans.
At the Paris Olympics, Swiss Timing — which, through its sister company Omega, has ties to the games since its role as timekeeper in Los Angeles in 1932 — introduced a new system for diving. It was able to track the distance between a diver’s head and the diving board — information that judges could use to determine whether a dive was executed safely or whether they should impose a point penalty.
Alain Zobrist, CEO of Swiss Timing, says advances in visual data collection and processing speed have opened up a world of new possibilities.
“We can track athletes’ performance or body movement in a very, very accurate way, something we couldn’t do before,” he says. “There is potential in some sports where technology — automated technology — could be the decision maker.”
In a further sign of changing times, at the upcoming Wimbledon tennis championships, line judges will no longer appear courtside. The oldest of tennis’ four Grand Slams took the decision to replace human line officials with a fully automated ball tracking system, marking the end of an era that lasted more than a century.
Hawk-Eye, which developed the electronic system that tells whether the ball has gone in or out, has provided refereeing technology to Wimbledon since 2007. The UK-based company is owned by Sony Sports and now works with 23 of the top 25 leagues sports in the world. It recently announced a “joint venture” with FIFA to build a technology center to explore how algorithms can help improve referees’ on-field decision-making.
Rufus Hack, CEO of Sony Sports, says the advancement of technology in elite sports is likely to be gradual, even as recent advances in areas such as skeletal tracking and machine learning open the door to new applications.
“Ultimately, the long-term direction, I think, is to have more technology in sports,” Hack says. “I think most people recognize that it’s faster, fairer and more objective than humans making decisions. But it has to be done gradually and carefully.”
Progress can be faster when implementing in lower leagues and even technology-based technology already used in elite tournaments. And existing systems are being improved. For example, when automated impeachment technology was first deployed, it took 90 seconds to reach a verdict. Now, that wait has been reduced to one second.
Genius Sports, which provides semi-automated offside technology for the English Premier League, initially developed much of its technology to help teams, leagues and broadcasters track performance and generate live data. Capturing player movements and biometric data, for example, can help identify when fatigue starts to take its toll or if a tactical change by the opposing team requires a response.
But being able to track and analyze an increasing number of points on a single athlete’s body 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. This, in turn, can determine where players are in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the ball and the lines of the field. This makes it possible to measure simple decisions, such as offsides, almost instantly, and help humans make decisions on the field, such as whether a ball is in play. But in the future, potential applications could go much further.
“It’s about helping an officer get to a better result in a faster period of time. And then, I think, you’ll see these more complex use cases mature at some point in the future,” says Fleckenstein. “Whether it’s in 10 years or 15 years, who knows? They’ll mature to probably be fully automated, like what we’re starting to see with line calls in tennis.”
