hi.

And on clay specifically, there's also the ball mark. That's what makes this debate different from hard courts. You're not choosing between a human opinion and nothing; you're comparing an electronic reconstruction with a physical mark left on the court. People often go for the "Humans make mistakes, so use Hawk-Eye" argument. Sure, but Hawk-Eye isn't measuring the bounce directly either? It's a very sophisticated estimate based on camera tracking, and it has its own margin of error. The whole question is which evidence should be trusted most when they conflict...

This debate keeps coming back not because Roland Garros is stubborn or living in the past, but because even players don't always trust the technology on clay. We've seen multiple pros challenge electronic calls when they believed the mark showed something different. That doesn't prove Hawk-Eye was wrong, but it does show the issue isn't as clear-cut as some people make it sound. The way some fans talk about it, every disagreement is automatically proof that the umpire got it wrong. But if the mark, the umpire, and Hawk-Eye don't agree, then all we really know is that at least one of them is wrong. The difficult part is deciding which one.

And what gets lost in these discussions is that most of these controversial calls are extremely close. They're often within the margin of error of both the technology and the human interpretation of the mark. In those situations, it's far too easy to simply declare Hawk-Eye correct by default. That's not a conclusion, it's an assumption. When the disagreement is only a few millimetres, saying Hawk-Eye must be right is often just choosing to trust the technology, not proving that the technology was right....