Matthew Sheahan

ADVANCING TECHNOLOGY MEANS RACE UMPIRING COULD SOON BE ADJUDICATED IN THE CLOUD VIA MOBILE PHONE APPS

How happy would you be to have your behaviour on the race course watched and scrutinised by an umpire in the cloud? Would you be prepared to abide by a traffic light system on your instrument display that told you when you were pushing your luck, or pulled you up when you had gone too far?

Perhaps if everyone had to abide by a Big Brother-style umpiring system we’d all feel a bit more comfortable about accepting it. Or perhaps the threat of a recording of the infringement being emailed to us as evidence would simply be a big enough deterrent?

The concept isn’t as far fetched as you might think. It’s been happening for some time, albeit in the rarefied world of the America’s Cup where remote umpiring and lights on the boats to inform crews has meant the professionals have become used to an eye in the sky controlling their behaviour.

So perhaps it will come as little surprise that the person who led the development of these systems, as well as creating the aerial overlays to mark out the America’s Cup race track, is the person who is putting forward the idea of off-water umpiring for all.

In fact, he believes that the system could even help encourage those who find the idea of racing intimidating and perhaps help to boost racing fleets around the world. And when that man is the highly accomplished sailor, navigator and TV technology genius Stan Honey, you sit up and listen.

He sees the next step forward as being made possible by advances in modern phone technology.

“That got us thinking, so we’re now working on a recreational umpiring system for situations where you can’t afford real umpires and you do the umpiring in the cloud. But the question would be, could this help sailors who aren’t yet racers because they’re worried about the complexity of the rules and they don’t want to get yelled at?

“Would it be helpful to be able to tell them, just start the race and if [the icon on] your phone turns red you do circles, if your phone’s screen is green carry on. And if you make sure your phone’s green before the finish nobody will yell at you.”

It’s an interesting thought that has plenty of other potential uses.

Given the ease with which a start line can be pinged electronically, identifying over-eager starters and preventing general recalls could be simplified as the race committee would have a record of who was over without having to see the individual culprits.

At the other end of the size scale the system could be used to help collision avoidance in big boats. In the superyacht world the risk of collisions has already been reduced by having a designated member of each crew talk to other boats over the VHF during racing to declare their intentions in, say, developing port and starboard situations. But would the system require a team of umpires to be watching remotely or could it work independently? “There are some rules that are still too hard to get umpired by a computer but you could come up with a slightly simpler set of rules along the same lines,” he continued. “Take a port/starboard or windward/leeward situation: you’d make the call a little bit in advance. When the boats get within say 5-10m of one another the decision would be based on a layline position. And if the port tack boat’s phone turns yellow, then that’s a warning – don’t try to cross, it’s going to be a penalty because if your phone turns red you’re going to have to do circles.

“So if your phone does turn yellow, you’ve got to either tack or you’ve got to duck.”

And Honey believes the applications could go even further.

“You could use the data for a performance assessment if you have a complicated handicap scoring system to achieve real time standings. “And while no system will be perfect there will still be a sense of fairness in that it’s the same for everyone.”

So, as someone who is becoming increasingly grumpy at the lack of rules observance in some fleets, along with endless general recalls, I for one would be happy to be watched.

‘It could be used to identify over-eager starters’