Sailing-Umpires push new boundaries ashore as America's Cup boats take off

BARCELONA : With America's Cup boats now hitting speeds of up to 55 knots the sport is also changing fast for umpires, who use an online tracking system to oversee racing from an office ashore.

Their systems were tested to the full during the America's Cup final between New Zealand and Britain when the two AC75 monohulls came within a whisker of clashing foils, an incident for which the umpires penalised the British team.

Employing The Umpire Tool (TUT), which uses GPS trackers to pinpoint the position of the boats on a screen, officials are working at only a third of a second behind real time.

The GPS on the boats in which holders New Zealand and challengers Britain are going head-to-head this weekend, give their position to within two centimetres and their direction to within a thousandth of a degree.

"We don't have umpire boats, we physically can't," said Chief Umpire Richard Slater as he demonstrated TUT.

In the event that something goes wrong with the technology, the officials have an option B in the form of a VAR system.

This involves 11 feeds which normally include live video from two helicopters, the stern cameras on the AC75s and those on the chase boats and "anything that is a useful camera" for the umpires looking to make decisions about incidents at sea.

"This allows us to put them together as single, double, quad pictures which are all synchronised and then we can stop and replay if we need to," Slater told Reuters in Barcelona.

Slater showed how the two umpires each tracking one of the boats during a race can see their outline, the imaginary boundaries around it, the compass setting and speed they are doing, their true wind angle and the wind speed, all of which are factors that help them to decide on any