Hawk-Ear and the Data Age
How Marco Polo became the most measured sport on earth.
For its first 43 years, Marco Polo was recorded only as results. That changed in 1974, when officials began writing down every Marco call on paper Call Sheets: the caller, the chukka, the time on the clock, and whether a tag followed.
Electronic measurement arrived in 2003. Pressure-plate microphones mounted 1.000 m from the water surface measured the volume of each call, and electronic timers measured the gap between the end of each “Marco” and the start of each “Polo”: the Polo Response Latency, now the sport's most-quoted statistic.
In 2011, FIMP introduced Hawk-Ear: 32 hydrophones beneath the water and 64 microphones around the pool, synchronised to 0.1 milliseconds. Hawk-Ear tracks every athlete's position 25 times a second and computes Bearing Error, the angle between the direction a Marco lunges and the direction of the nearest evader.
The FIMP Call Archive now holds 9,209,580 logged calls from World Championships and sanctioned events since 1974. Every call from the 2026 finals is published in full on the Open Data portal.