When U.S. sprinter Noah Lyles outpaced his Jamaican rival Kishane Thompson for the 100-meter gold medal in Paris this summer, the 2 men were separated by five thousandths of a second. The race was the closest in Olympic history – however the final result was known almost immediately because of latest cameras that would capture and process 40,000 images per second.
And that is just one in all the numerous advances which have been made in determining outcomes in sport. While referees, umpires and judges have at all times been the final word arbiters of sports rules, technology has long played a task. Photofinish cameras were first used on the London Olympics in 1948, and electronic timing became standard across all Olympic sports on the Mexico City Games 20 years later.
In recent years, advances in each software and hardware have led to increasing automation of office management. In football, goal-line technology, which immediately determines whether a goal has been scored, made its debut on the 2012 Club World Cup, while a decade later semi-automatic offsides were introduced within the UEFA Champions League group stage.
Now many within the industry consider a brand new technological revolution is underway in sport, which can see more on-field decisions being made by automated systems quite than simply humans alone.
At the Paris Olympics, Swiss Timing – which, through its sister company Omega, has ties to the games dating back to its role as timekeeper in Los Angeles in 1932 – introduced a brand new system for diving. It was capable of track the gap between a high diver's head and the diving board – information that helped judges determine whether a jump was performed safely or whether a points penalty must be imposed.
Alain Zobrist, managing director of Swiss Timing, says breakthroughs in visual data capture and processing speed have opened up a world of latest possibilities.
“We can track the performance or body movement of each athletes very, very precisely, which we couldn’t do before,” he says. “In some sports there’s potential for technology – automated technology – to be the choice maker.”
In one other sign of adjusting times, linesmen will now not appear on the sidelines at next summer's Wimbledon tennis championships. The oldest of 4 tennis Grand Slam tournaments has made the choice to exchange its human linesmen with a totally automated ball tracking system, marking the tip of an era that had lasted greater than a century.
Hawk-Eye, which developed the electronic line calling system, has provided the official technology for Wimbledon since 2007. The UK-based company is owned by Sony Sports and now works with 23 of the highest 25 sports leagues on this planet. The company recently announced a three way partnership with Fifa, world soccer's governing body, to construct a technology center to review how algorithms may also help improve referees' on-field decision-making.
Rufus Hack, CEO of Sony Sports, says the advancement of technology in elite sport is more likely to be gradual, although recent breakthroughs in areas corresponding to skeletal tracking and machine learning open the door to latest applications.
“Ultimately, I feel in the long run it’s about using more technology in sport,” says Hack. “I feel most individuals realize that it is quicker, fairer and more objective than humans making decisions. But it must be done steadily and thoughtfully.”
He adds that progress in introducing technologies already used at elite level may very well be faster in lower leagues and even grassroots sports. And existing systems are improved. For example, when automated offside technology was first used, it took 90 seconds to make a judgment. Now that waiting time has been reduced to at least one second.
Genius Sports, which provides semi-automated offside technology to the English Premier League, originally developed much of its technology to assist teams, leagues and broadcasters track their performance and generate live data. For example, capturing player movements and biometric data may also help discover when fatigue is taking its toll or whether a tactical change from the opposing team requires a response.
But the power to trace and analyze an increasing variety of points on a person athlete's body has quickly led to applications in refereeing. Matt Fleckenstein, chief product officer at Genius, points to advances in several areas, including camera technology and data processing, which have made it easier to develop systems to implement the principles.
For example, it is feasible to trace as much as 10,000 points on an athlete's body during a live game. This information may be used to create a 3D model of what is occurring on the sector. This, in turn, can determine where players are in relation to one another in addition to in relation to the ball and features on the sector. This makes it possible to measure easy decisions corresponding to offsides almost immediately and to assist people make decisions on the pitch, for instance whether a ball is in play. But the possible applications could go much further in the long run.
“It’s about helping an officer get a greater lead to less time. And then I feel these more complex use cases will mature sooner or later in the long run,” Fleckenstein says. “Whether it’s 10 or 15 years, who knows? They will likely mature into a totally automated system like we’re beginning to see with line calls in tennis.”
