The changes to the grass patterns can be explained by vastly improved landscaping techniques and products. Also, the grass could be a different variety now than 40 years ago.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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For stuff that's neat. Neat article? Neat video? Neat pic of a bug you saw? All good. Neat meme? Ehhh... take it to the meme subs.
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Yep, got suckered in to the article just for them to say it at the end.
It’s also possible that these pictures overstate the change. Beyond more durable grass, Wimbledon has also added more courts to the tennis complex since the 1990s, meaning fewer games need to be played at Centre Court. Ergo: less wear and tear.
Hah!
This is kinda funny. Like, if I were facing this same problem, I'd have a completely-different way of going about doing that analysis -- take footage from fixed camera during tennis matches, edit out the cuts to other cameras where people are doing things like walking around, and then just composite all the images in the remaining video. Maybe a subtract a (potentially-composite) image of the field without people on it to get just the people moving around. Would not have thought of looking at plain old real-world analog grass wear.
To me it seems less like they wanted to analyze the patterns of play and chose to look at grass over video, but instead just noticed the grass pattern change and ascribed to it a change in play patterns.