With live electronic line-calling the new normal in professional tennis in 2025, disputes between players and officials over whether a ball was in or out are, largely, a thing of the past. But at the Australian Open, one key officiating decision has been left in the hands of the chair umpire—and that fact left doubles player Erin Routliffe stunned on Friday.
Routliffe and her partner, Gabriela Dabrowski, the second seeds in the women’s doubles event, were in the midst of a tense third-round match with No. 15 seeds Beatriz Haddad Maia and Laura Siegemend when Routliffe learned that robots haven’t taken over the tennis world entirely. Serving at 1-1 in the tiebreak, Hadda Maia hammered a wide, swinging serve that the Canadian-born New Zealander could barely get a racquet on.
Or did she?
Routliffe and her partner were both convinced that Haddad Maia’s serve had skimmed the net as it came over, and that a let should’ve been called. But the point was awarded to the Brazlian-German pair, as chair umpire Julie Kjendlie said she didn’t hear a let. Informed by the Norwegian official that there are no net devices in use at the tournament to determine lets, a break in established protocol at the sport’s biggest tournaments, Routliffe was aghast.
“Oh my God, we have robots everywhere and we don’t have them for the net?,” she asked, perhaps not only referencing ELC, but also the “Big Brother”-style brodcast cameras that have been ubiquitous behind the scenes since 2016, and the artificial intelligence that produces the tournament’s Wii Sports-inspired viral AO Animated live streams on YouTube.
