The Old World meets IT at Wimbledon

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By Pia Landergren

(IDG) -- On Monday, the world's tennis elite wrapped up another year at the Wimbledon Championships. As tradition has it, they entertained a well-behaved audience who sipped champagne with their strawberries and cream and watched Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent present trophies to the winners. This was old England at its best, and it's the way the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, which hosts the event, wants to keep it.

Technology plays a vital role at the event, providing a play by play account to those both inside the grounds and out. But the technology must be discreet enough not to detract from an event so steeped in tradition. This year, the main IT supplier, IBM Corp., introduced special equipment to help TV viewers, commentators, Web site visitors and even the players themselves keep track of the scores and statistics. The goal: to let the audience focus on the serves, not the servers.

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"AELTCC doesn't want the technology to show," said Martin Purkis, the IBM official responsible for the smooth running of the IT infrastructure at Wimbledon, in Southwest London.

Computers, monitors, servers and cables are for the most part buried in an operations room in a basement on the grounds. Here, a team of some 150 technicians with skills ranging from networking, content delivery and -- of course -- tennis labored hard for the two-week period.

When viewers saw the U.S.'s Taylor Dent hit a record 144 mile-per-hour serve against Australia's Lleyton Hewitt early in the tournament, a discreet radar system similar to that used by traffic police measured the speed of the ball. Two radar heads not much larger than canned drinks positioned carefully on slim poles or against a wall were activated moments before Dent served the ball. The operator sat just out of site from the audience and recorded the speed of the ball at the moment it left the head of the racket.

Hidden away on the broadcast center roof or in commentator boxes, data entry teams fed the scores and statistics into ThinkPad computers with specially designed keypads. Instead of letters and numbers, the keys were labeled "serve to forehand," "serve to backhand," "fault" and so on. About 40 tennis experts trained by IBM to use the equipment recorded the scores during the tournament.

The information was transmitted to broadcast systems all around Wimbledon. It was fed, for example, to a system developed for TV and radio commentators that helped them keep track of the games. Each commentator had a flat-screen monitor hidden away in their commentator box. Using touch-screen displays, they accessed various statistics to relay to their audiences. A prompter system allowed tennis experts stationed at courtside and armed with handheld computers to highlight facts and figures that they thought might be of particular use to the commentators.

The statistics were also used for television graphics and captions, as well as for the Wimbledon Information System, an intranet that could be accessed by spectators from various stations located discretely around the grounds, for example from a TV monitor in a corner in one of the restaurants.

In all, 200 computers including 80 laptops and dozens of Wordpad PDAs were employed in the effort, attached to IBM Netfinity servers that stored details of the estimated quarter of a million shots played over the two weeks. Supporting the mixed Token Ring and Ethernet networks across the grounds were IBM's 8250 and 8260 Multiprotocol Intelligent Hubs and Cisco System Inc.'s 5000 and 6000 series Ethernet switches.

All of the equipment was concealed as much as possible. After all, it wouldn't do to have members of royalty tripping over cameras and cables with their champagne glasses. Wimbledon has been around since 1877, and kings and queens have been seen on the prestigious grounds more than once.