Sailing-Umpires push new boundaries ashore as America’s Cup boats take off

BARCELONA : With America’s Cup boats now hitting speeds of up to 55 knots the sport is also changing fast for umpires, who use an online tracking system to oversee racing from an office ashore.
Their systems were tested to the full during the America’s Cup final between New Zealand and Britain when the two AC75 monohulls came within a whisker of clashing foils, an incident for which the umpires penalised the British team.
Employing The Umpire Tool (TUT), which uses GPS trackers to pinpoint the position of the boats on a screen, officials are working at only a third of a second behind real time.
The GPS on the boats in which holders New Zealand and challengers Britain are going head-to-head this weekend, give their position to within two centimetres and their direction to within a thousandth of a degree.
“We don’t have umpire boats, we physically can’t,” said Chief Umpire Richard Slater as he demonstrated TUT.
In the event that something goes wrong with the technology, the officials have an option B in the form of a VAR system.
This involves 11 feeds which normally include live video from two helicopters, the stern cameras on the AC75s and those on the chase boats and “anything that is a useful camera” for the umpires looking to make decisions about incidents at sea.
“This allows us to put them together as single, double, quad pictures which are all synchronised and then we can stop and replay if we need to,” Slater told Reuters in Barcelona.
Slater showed how the two umpires each tracking one of the boats during a race can see their outline, the imaginary boundaries around it, the compass setting and speed they are doing, their true wind angle and the wind speed, all of which are factors that help them to decide on any infringements.
“We want to be able to present the umpires with the facts, so that they can just implement the rules,” Slater said of the system, adding that they rarely had to resort to VAR.
“We just expect it to be 100 per cent all of the time,” Slater said of the application’s reliability, although he is itching for a “version two” because there are so many tweaks that need to be made.
One of the questions some sailors have asked during the 37th America’s Cup in Barcelona is whether there is an experience gap between the officials who oversee the races and the reality of handling boats that very few people have sailed.
Slater has found a simple way to get foiling experience and relaxing when he is not managing races – the Australian has taken up the challenging watersport of wing foiling.