Last Friday night in Paris, anyone who was watching Carlos Alcaraz and Sebastian Korda’s late-night match on television — and who had also seen the Zendaya tennis movie you may have heard of called Challengers — had a dizzying flashback.
Suddenly a camera appeared from the side of the court, just above the level of the net, swinging back and forth as the players fought for control of the net. Barely keeping up with their speed of movement and thought, he veered from side to side, following the ball across the clay and along the white lines and coming to a stunning stop as Korda, the American No. 27, stopped a ferocious shot from n. 3 seeded Alcaraz dead in the net.
It didn’t have the brash aestheticism of Challengers director Luca Guadagnino’s work, with the camera merging with the ball, but it was a fresh perspective on a sport whose television coverage does little service to the ferocious effects and phenomenal speed at which they apply them its best players. that furry yellow ball.
Innovation. Fun. A little self-awareness. Everything that so many obsessive and casual fans of the sport cry about.
And everything this technology – a small frontal camera worn by on-court umpires at the French Open, Philippe-Chatrier – may not have intended to be.
— BastinoMedia (@BastinoMedia) May 31, 2024
The world of invention is full of products and gadgets intended for one purpose that have found their rhythm with another.
The bubble wrap was supposed to be three-dimensional wallpaper. Viagra was a new blood pressure drug. The slinky was a foolproof way to protect naval instruments in rough seas.
Referee-Camera, welcome to the ranks of unintended consequences.
Getting that close-up, rotatable view was a big part of the thinking when leaders of the French tennis federation, the FFT, began toying with the idea of a camera perched on the umpire’s chair more than a year ago. There were visions of never-before-seen footage of forehands hurtling across the net at 80 miles per hour, so fast they seemed to drag the camera with them.
“Let’s face it, they have the best seat in the stadium,” said Pascal Maria, the French Open assistant referee. Nobody can buy that place, but the idea was that they could let the fans experience that view.
From a television perspective, it mostly didn’t go so well. Watching a game up close on a high-speed rotating screen can be a rather nauseating experience for both television producers and fans. Instead, the purpose of the technology has been redirected to serve a pedestrian, but at Roland Garros, the more important purpose: allowing everyone to see the signs that referees look at when deciding whether a ball is in or out.
This didn’t work out great either. When the umpires climb down from their chairs to inspect the ball markings and decide whether their colleagues who called the lines have botched the job, the footage is so fleeting as to be practically useless, in part because the people wearing the cameras are so good – most of the time – at understanding that they are looking at them for less than a second.
“Good for playback, slowed down, (but) hard to cut to live,” said Bob Whyley, Tennis Channel’s senior vice president of production and executive producer. “The referee’s head, looking at the point, is too fast.”
Andy Murray asked on X if there was worse technology in sports. Victoria Azarenka wondered why it was available, but more mundane things like phone reviews aren’t.
Amelie Mauresmo, tournament director, said officials had scrapped the idea of cutting the main camera for live footage after just a few days.
“It’s a little complicated,” he said, but if there are good images, like a chat with a player or an inspection of the ball, those would make the replay cut.
The French Open has also committed itself to introducing cameras, while the other Grand Slam tournaments have no plans to introduce them for now. This is largely due to the tournament introduced cameras on the referee’s head to monitor line calls, but instead created a player’s point of view that will go down in tennis lore.
Specifically, the referee’s point that athletes worth tens of millions of dollars (and more) complain to them like children begging a parent who won’t let them eat dessert or watch television.
Without Ump-Head, there is no image of the French’s last hope Corentin Moutet during his match against world number 2 Jannik Sinner on Wednesday evening, begging for justice with Nico Helwerth, an official German tennis expert. He was angry because a linesman had called him for a foot fault on his favorite shot, the underarm serve.
He was wrong and didn’t get his justice and the audience got to see what it really feels like to be yelled at by a sweaty, hulking mess who’s on edge. Depending on the level of profanity and the decisions of the broadcast producers, they can also hear exactly what the referee and player are talking about.
Corentin Moutet pleads his case (Eurosport)
The referee explains his reasoning (Eurosport)
Louise Engzell, a Swedish referee, said she felt the camera was a kind of security blanket, both for players who go too far and for commentators who inadvertently misrepresent conversations they are having with players. players.
“I prefer them to have information about what really happened in a situation: why the referee made this decision and whether we are 100% right or is it a gray area,” Engzell said in an interview on cameras during one of many rain delays over the weekend.
At least they know and can discuss the reality of what happened. It can only be good.”
Point-of-view coverage has been a success in other sports, inviting viewers to better understand the speed, effort and difficulty of what they’re watching, which can sometimes be muted by a camera’s wide-angle view.
During a pre-season match between Aston Villa and Newcastle United last summer, Villa footballer Youri Tielemans wore a camera on his chest, demonstrating the quick thinking that footballers must demonstrate at the highest level, even in a match with nothing in palio. .
This works most often by making it a stand-alone viewing – usually outside of a live broadcast, like Tielemans’ featured video – or by relying on a fixed camera, attached to fixed equipment. In tennis, the court-level camera does a much better job of showing the incredible shape and intensity of the players’ ball strike, but it removes the context of the angles provided by a wider shot.
It also lacks the extreme shift of a POV camera, which makes a huge difference in making a momentary replay stand out.
Engzell was part of the first attempts to equip umpires with cameras at last year’s French Open. Jean-Patrick Reydellet, head of umpires at the French Open, said this involved buying some GoPros and strapping them to the umpire’s chest. They did not share the footage with broadcast partners but reviewed it after the games.
The results were not exceptional. Some nice views of the field, but the angle didn’t quite work. Also, referees don’t move their chests much, so there was a lot of footage of the top of the net and the touch screen being handled by the referee.
Engzell said the chest camera was also an uncomfortable setup for female referees.
Reydellet and his staff evaluated the cameras that officials wear in the NBA, rugby and other sports. The ear setup seemed the best. The umpires who were willing to try them during the qualifying tournament two weeks ago and gave the thumbs up, especially after seeing how the camera could show exactly how they inspected the mark of a ball to see if it landed on the line, following the outline gives the clay to compete with its circumference.
Corentin Moutet pleads his case, with the referee’s camera visible (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
It didn’t really work. Part of the reason is that referees only have to take a look, which leaves the viewer with a disorienting head shake and little else. It also doesn’t “sell” the decision very well to fans and players – a problem football has encountered with Video Assistant Referee (VAR) when referees change a decision without watching it themselves.
“Item it’s a camera that obviously needs to get better,” Reydellet said. “Probably smaller batteries, probably longer life, probably different settings we can work with.”
Part of the goal is also to show how complex the work is. The French Open wants to use the footage to teach aspiring umpires, to give viewers an idea of everything a player has to do and to add a new level of transparency to the umpiring process and its myriad tasks.
In an interview, Helwerth listed the checklist he goes through on each point.
Check if the receiver is ready, if the ball boys are in position, if the line judges are where they should be, turn off the service clock, having just turned it on, enter the last point on the tablet, check the audience. When it’s over, take a look at the point loser to make sure he’s doing well. If they come to talk, turn off the stadium microphone, but not the camera, of course, so be sure to turn it back on.
“We don’t get bored up there,” he said.
For this year, the cameras are only in use on the main pitch, but it’s hard not to see them moved to other pitches in the future, especially after an umpire inspected the wrong ball mark to decide on a point on the Simonne-Mathieu pitch in a match between Zheng Qinwen and Elina Avanesyan.
Maybe next year someone watching a monitor under the stadium could shout into a transmitter, “No, not that!”
That would be nice. Not as good as Moutet’s shot.
(Top photo: Eurosport)
