No ELC at Roland Garros? No problem

In recent years, while more and more tournaments embraced electronic line-calling (ELC) systems, the French Tennis Federation’s annual announcement that it would retain human line umpires was generally met with eye-rolls and, often, snide comments.

“The French gonna be French.”

This year, though, is a little different. There have been some high-profile complaints about the use of ELC at clay-court events, which is now mandatory at all ATP and WTA tournaments above the 250 level but still optional for Grand Slam events. The flash point for controversy is the lack of an appeal process in the event the almighty machine makes an error. And the machine has been shown to be less than infallible.

ELC cameras make mistakes. Maybe not as many in the big picture as their human counterparts, but they do err. Perhaps it’s time to ask if the French way, where the umpire is empowered to examine marks and overrule, isn’t superior to the omnipotent digital arbiter.

Pundits and officials agree that ELC systems may be less accurate on clay than on hard courts or even grass, because the ground-up red brick top dressing is loose and granular and the underlying clay soft. The marks balls leave are all different, like fingerprints, their shapes imprecise. As a result, the pros end up playing Hawkeye Roulette, because the cameras cannot be challenged, as No. 2 ranked Elena Rybakina discovered at the recent Madrid Masters.

At an important moment in her third-round match with Zheng Qinwen, the Chinese player hit a serve that was deemed an ace by the ELC system. Rybakina approached the net and gestured at the mark, which was clearly outside the line.

“This is not a joke,” she said. “The system is wrong. It is not touching (the line) It is absolutely wrong.”

Rybakina invited Julie Kjendlie, the chair umpire, to come down and see for herself. But the official declined, explaining that she was not allowed to overrule the computer.

“Now that we have ELC,” Kendjlie told the player, “that’s what I have to go with.”

Rybakina later told reporters the ace was a “stolen point,” and that she had “no trust” in the technology.

Alexander Zverev is emerging as the poster child for getting robbed of points. In Madrid, the ATP No. 3 stopped playing during a rally when a Terence Atmane forehand clearly sailed  beyond the baseline—but no call was forthcoming. Zverev flung out his arms, glaring at the umpire in disbelief, and demanded: “How it is possible?"

When Zverev’s appeal to the chair met with the same response as Rybakina’s, the German star grumbled, “Then [you] should be allowed to come down to see the bite if there is a mistake like this.” The incident was a near replay of the one that occurred during Zverev’s match with Alejandro Davidovic Fokina in the previous (2025) edition of the tournament.

Ironically, human line-callers haven’t always been kind to Zverev, either.

During the critical fifth set of the 2024 Roland Garros final between Zverev and Carlos Alcaraz, a line umpire called an Alcaraz second serve out. The chair umpire clambered down and eventually overruled the call, but on television spectators saw a replay that showed the serve out, albeit within the near three-millimeter margin of error the technology admits to. Alcaraz went on to win the point and the title.

Rybakina and Zverev were not the only players in Madrid to feel they got hooked by ELC.  Luciano Darderi was also rebuffed by an umpire when asked to inspect a mark during the Italian’s third-round match, which he lost to Francisco Cerundolo.

I still think that [electronic line-calling is] the right way to go forward. Alexander Zverev

Similar examples of the machine raging against the man—or woman—have cropped up with some frequency, triggering players. Curiously, at the outset of the ELC era the technology was used to protect players from poor officiating. But even then there was concern about the accuracy of digital officiating and the embrace of technology. Roger Federer got that ball rolling in the early days of the ELC era by famously losing numerous challenges to Hawk-Eye during that early period when players were allowed three challenges per set if they believed a line umpire flubbed a call. Federer, among others, simply couldn’t believe that his eyes had lied.

Taken together, the anecdotes suggest that the tours ought to revisit the ironclad rules forbidding chair umpires to overrule machines at clay-court tournaments. There have been too many cases in which the evidence has been indisputable.

Nobody wants to throw the techno-baby out with the bathwater. Even Zverev, who may have the most legitimate beef of anyone against ELC, believes in ELC.

“I like the electronic line calling, there was [just] something wrong with the system in Madrid,” he said in the Spanish capital. “I think the weeks before (Monte Carlo, Munich et al)  it worked perfectly fine. It was mistake-free, kind of. I still think that it's the right way to go forward.”

The swift rise of ELC has created some other problems, both large and small. The system eliminates the traditional revenue stream generated by clothing deals for line umpires, a consideration that loomed large in the USTA’s decision in 2000 to have officials (clothed by Ralph Lauren) on the two main show courts. They had no function because ELC was used to call all shots, but the optics were good for RL as well as television.

Also, people have long been recruited to work as line umpires in amateur and age-group events, the incentive being that they could work their way up, earning ever larger assignments over the years culminating with the chance to officiate at majors. Where will chair umpires come from once the current generation ages out?

Many fans who tune in to Roland Garros will undoubtedly find it maddening that the French continue to hold out against ELC. Some will parrot the party line about the disarray in tennis governance. But to others, the sight of those mid-match, chin-stroking conferences over the most binary choice in sports is a feature, not a glitch. You don’t have to be French to appreciate the charm inherent in the way some line-call disputes play out at Roland Garros. Aren’t tennis players supposed to be entertainers now anyway?

Do you need reminding that without the chair umpire’s overrule powers we never would have witnessed the tennis version of the NFL’s notorious “butt fumble?” That occurred in 2009, when the chair umpire in Paris refused to overrule a call that went against Chilean hothead Fernando Gonzalez during his semifinal match with Robin Soderling.

In response to the snub, Gonzalez sat down on the mark and robbed it out with his butt, leaving the back of his shorts stained red for the rest of the match.

"I didn't know really what to do, because I show the mark,” Gonzalez said later. “And then, I don't know, I just did something for fun, because there is no way out after that.”