The News
The Wimbledon tennis championships will abolish line judges after 147 years. The white-trousered and blue-blazered officials’ role is to yell a noise roughly approximating to “out” when they judge that a ball has fallen outside the line. But since 2007 they have been aided, and sometimes overridden, by electronic systems.
Both the Australian and US Opens have removed human judges, a process sped up during the pandemic by the need to reduce the number of people on the court. But Wimbledon’s grass surfaces are more challenging, as are the clay courts of the French Open, which from next year will be the only Grand Slam to retain line judges.