When a line judge at Wimbledon rules on a hair-splittingly close call and says the ball is out, the inevitably disgruntled player should not only consider challenging the call for review by digital replay system. He should consult a recent issue of Current Biology.
A vast majority of near-the-line shots called incorrectly by Wimbledon line judges have come on balls ruled out that were actually in, a study published in October by researchers at the University of California-Davis showed.
To the vision scientist, the finding added to the growing knowledge of how the human eye and brain misperceive high-speed objects. To the tennis player, it strongly suggests which calls are worth challenging and which are best left alone.
The researchers identified 83 missed calls during the 2007 Wimbledon tournament. Some were challenged by players and overruled, while others were later identified as unquestionably wrong through frame-by-frame video. Seventy of those 83 calls, or 84 percent, were on balls ruled out — essentially, shots that line judges believed had traveled farther than they actually did.
Called perceptual mislocalization by vision scientists, this subconscious bias is known less formally to Wimbledon fans as “You cannot be serious” — John McEnroe’s infamous dissent when, yes, a 1981 shot was ruled out.
Now that players can resort to a more evolved appeals procedure, the researchers’ discovery suggests that players should generally use their limited number of challenges on questionable out calls rather than those that are called in, because such out calls have a far better chance of being discovered as mistaken on review, then overturned.
“What we’re really interested in is how visual information is processed, and how it can be used to a player’s advantage,” said David Whitney, an associate professor at UC-Davis’ Center for Mind and Brain and the paper’s lead author. “There is a delay of roughly 80 to 150 milliseconds from the first moment of perception to our processing it, and that’s a long time. That’s one reason why it’s so hard to catch a fly — the fly’s ability to dance around is faster than our ability to determine where it is.”
This is the third Wimbledon in which players can challenge questionable calls for review by Hawk Eye, which uses high-speed video cameras to record balls’ flight. About 25 percent of all challenges are upheld.
There is no cost to the player when a call is proved correct, but after three such episodes in a set a player may not challenge again. Whether through strategy or residual tennis etiquette, most players leave many challenges unused.
Theoretically, line judges should be equally prone to call an out ball in as they are an in ball out. But when objects travel faster than humans’ eyes and brains can precisely track them — for example, Andy Roddick’s 240kph serves — they are left having to fill in the gaps in their perception. In doing so they tend to overshoot the object’s actual location and think it traveled slightly farther than it truly did.
Both successful challenge calls, as well as the overlooked mistakes that the researchers later identified, were several times more likely to come on “long” calls than “in” calls. The same pattern existed at Wimbledon last year, Whitney said, although the paper did not present that data.
So players are better off using as many challenges as possible on balls called out, because those are the calls most likely to be wrong. If a player thinks an “in” call was wrong, chances are his own eyes were as fooled as line judges’ sometimes are.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier