Inside Hawk-Ear: how 96 sensors follow a final
Thirty-two hydrophones, sixty-four microphones and 25 positions a second.
Hawk-Ear has followed every championship athlete since the 2011 Outdoor World Championship. Thirty-two hydrophones sit beneath the water and sixty-four microphones surround the pool, synchronised to 0.1 milliseconds.
From those signals Hawk-Ear calculates each athlete's position 25 times a second, the volume and duration of every Marco call, every evader's Polo Response Latency, and the Bearing Error of every lunge. Its measurements are definitive under Article 11.2.3.
The 2026 finals were reconstructed from Hawk-Ear data in the replays on the Indoor and Outdoor championship pages.
FIMP Media · Photo: Cristian Palmer / Unsplash
