Roland Garros: The only Slam without Hawk-Eye

There is an image, at Roland Garros, that captures the nature of this tournament better than any statement. The chair umpire climbs down from his seat, crosses the court on the diagonal, leans over. He studies a small red oval imprinted in the clay. Then he raises a finger, or lowers it. He decides. It is a slow ritual, almost religious, that no longer exists in any other Slam.

In recent years, the Australian Open, the US Open and Wimbledon have dismissed their line judges. The Australian Open went first, in 2021, the US Open with a gradual transition finished the following year, Wimbledon in 2025, the last to give in. Algorithms and cameras now call every ball, instantly, without effort and without expression. Roland Garros resists. It has remained the only major tournament in which a human being still kneels down to look at a mark.

The trace, or the error

The official position of the French Federation, repeated by Amélie Mauresmo and Gilles Moretton, swings between two arguments that contradict each other but serve the same purpose. The first is poetic: the clay leaves a mark, so the truth is already there, sculpted into the court, and you only have to look at it. The second is technical: the trace is treacherous, the ball moves the granules, the edge is blurry, and so not even a machine could replace the human eye in deciding whether that groove is in or out.

A trace that is sufficient on its own, and a trace too ambiguous to be read by an algorithm. It is a paradox that does not bother anyone in Paris, because both lines of reasoning lead to the same place. The judge stays on court. The decision remains human.

Then there is a third argument, less romantic but perhaps more honest. The French Federation supports a capillary network of officials trained inside national tournaments, from provincial clubs to the big events on the federal calendar. The Parisian Slam is the visible peak of that pyramid. If Paris adopts the electronic eye, the entire national pipeline loses its reason to exist. Defending the line judge here is not just nostalgia, it is industrial policy.

The cases that reopened the debate

On Sunday 24 May, on Simonne-Mathieu, Pierre-Hugues Herbert played four hours and nine minutes against Lorenzo Sonego. Fifth set, second game, Herbert serving and break point for Sonego: a contested call, and the Frenchman walked up to the umpire's chair. He looked up and uttered the sentence that bounced around social media for twenty-four hours: "Look me in the eyes. You'll see. It's out."

It is an archaic request, almost medieval. He was not asking for a camera, he was not asking for a replay. He was asking for a pact between two people. He wanted the other person to look at him and declare his own certainty. In an era in which sporting truth is increasingly a print-out of pixels, Herbert invoked eye contact as a tool of justice. He lost anyway, in five sets. But the scene entered the small mythological archive of this Slam.

On Wednesday, on Court 7, Tamara Korpatsch and Wang Xinyu found themselves at the center of another dispute. First set, a contested ball, the mark inspected and argued over; Wang crossed the net to check the trace from the other side, picking up a code violation from umpire Aurélie Tourte. The tension slipped under the skin for the rest of the match. The German won, 6-2 2-6 6-3. At the end of the match, it was Korpatsch who refused the handshake, explaining afterwards that you do not shake hands with someone who has come to check the mark on the other side of the net. And here comes the detail that changes everything: according to Korpatsch, the television Hawk-Eye, the one installed in Paris only for broadcasters, showed the ball out by about eight millimeters. The umpire's chair had called it in. The camera reconstruction said out. Korpatsch would defend her conduct by saying she does not know how to play unfairly. Wang would say she had been accused of cheating. They were both right, in some way. They were both wrong, in the same way.

The paradox of the invisible pixels

This is the point at which the French position becomes most fragile. Roland Garros rejects the electronic eye for in-game decisions, but rents it out to networks for television coverage. Every contested ball is reconstructed by the algorithm, shown to the public, and then forgotten. The system exists, it works, but it does not count. Inside the same venue two truths coexist: the truth of the clay, official, and the truth of technology, unofficial.

It is a contradiction that makes an engineer's head spin. To a novelist, on the other hand, it looks like the only honest form of realism. Because the truth of sports, when we watch from the outside, is always double. There is the truth the judge decides in real time, with responsibility weighing on him, and there is the truth we replay in slow motion, broken down into frames, perfect and useless. The two truths never touch. They live in different rooms of the same match.

In the other Slams these two rooms have been fused. Technological truth has eaten human truth. There is no more gap, no more dispute, not even the time to raise an eyebrow before the recorded voice says "out". Everything has already been decided before we could doubt. It is fair, it is precise, it is unimpeachable. And that is precisely why it is less interesting.

What Paris defends when it defends the error

It would be wrong to paint Roland Garros as a museum of the past. The FFT defends its line judges for economic, union and political reasons that have little to do with poetry. But beneath the industrial calculation there is a cultural choice that deserves to be acknowledged.

Twentieth-century tennis was built around a precise idea, the physical proof of truth. The mark on the clay, the line stained with chalk, the judge who decides with the naked eye. It was a sport that still believed reality could be read directly, without mediation. When Herbert asks an umpire to look him in the eye, he is asking for exactly this, a truth based on presence, on the body, on the gaze. Not a calculated truth, an encountered truth.

The electronic eye has eliminated the error. But it has also eliminated the moment in which a human being decides in place of another human being. It is a detail that seems negligible, until you realize that compressed into that small gesture was much of the liturgy of tennis, the player who protests, the umpire who listens, the crowd that splits, the decision that remains suspended for a few seconds. None of that was noise. It was form.

The last Slam with the mark

In a few years, probably, Paris will give in too. The pressure from the other federations, the cost of a visible error in front of hundreds of millions of viewers, the technological inertia that swallows one sector after another. It is possible that by the end of the decade we will be watching a Roland Garros called by a digital voice, with the clay reduced to scenery.

For now, though, the Parisian red still believes in the mark. It is a choice that can be debated, criticized, even ridiculed. But it is also one of the last forms in which sport accepts to be imperfect in public. To show, under the eye of the camera, that the truth is sometimes a matter of bending down and looking. Of standing up, deciding, and accepting that you might be wrong.

In a season in which every sport has handed its truth over to an algorithm, there is still a tournament in which a man or a woman in grey trousers walks across the court, bends down, and says what they see. Perhaps they get it wrong. Almost certainly, sometimes, they do. But they are still getting it wrong for us.