Wimbledon, amid grass courts, classic white and strawberries, is also a showcase for high tech gadgetry. This year is no exception.
The ’shot tracker’ is the latest wrinkle. It’s used by broadcasters to replay critical umpire calls and is available to all visitors at the Wimbledon Web site. It creates a three dimensional animated image of every rally of the main games.
An avalanche of data is collected by specialized score keepers, and displayed on the website. Shot tracker gives coaches and players even more insight.
“We had a player here who won 90 percent of points on the first service and only 27 percent on the second service. That is disastrous. This system picks up on all the second serves and can show what was going on,” said Keith Sohl, a tennis and technology consultant for Wimbledon.
Some coaches come to collect the match statistics a few minutes after the match is over, which reflects how the game has developed since a decade ago when keeping the score was the closest thing to data analysis, said Chris Lee, Wimbledon Project Director at IBM, who coordinates the technology behind the event.
Shot tracker, also known as Hawkeye, was developed by British engineer Paul Hawkins and has been used in other sports, such as cricket, for several years.
Reuters reports the shot tracker, live scoreboards and other innovations help Wimbledon remain a top destination for Web surfers, as the All England Lawn Tennis Club aims to boost profits that can be pumped back into the development of young tennis players.
During the two weeks of the championships, the normally dormant green and purple Wimbledon Web site pulls in close to 40 million visitors.
This year, a record 800,000 visitors viewed a total 23 million pages on the third day of competition. The three massive Internet farms of computers that are made available for the two weeks of the tournament were running at 70 percent of their capacity.
It’s what happens when a country is broadband enabled.
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