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 ball-tracking 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.
Bolton declined to say who made the mistake 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?