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The Wimbledon Championships, the most prestigious of professional tennis events, declared it would no longer use human line judges at next year’s tournament. In 2025, the London event will use an electronic line-calling system (ELC) instead.
First reported in The Times of London, the announcement marks a radical change to a 147-year-old tradition, albeit one that’s on trend with the sport’s broad shift toward technology-assisted officiating. In 2023, the Association of Tennis Professionals announced all of its events would move toward automating line calls, and two of the four Slams have already incorporated it. With Wimbledon going with ELC, the last holdout is the French Open.
In the past, a court was monitored by as many as nine line…