Starting Position Analysis of Winners in Short Track Speed Skating Competitions during 2007-2019.

Short track speed skating is a racing sport on ice, in which contestants compete against each other instead of the clock. Thus compared to the speed and technical skating ability, equally, if not more important is race tactics. This study analysed in-depth the starting positions of winners in 121 competitions during 2007-2019, where 173 female and 247 male champions were announced correspondingly from 4313 female and 5212 male individual races (preliminaries, heats, quarter-finals, semi-finals, and final in 500m, 1000m, 1500m, and 3000m classifications), to explore a pattern of effective tactical positioning strategy. The Kendall's tau-b (rt) correlation between starting and finishing position decreases with race distance, which was highest and positive for all 500m races (0.347, P<0.05), which verified previous studies. Furthermore, starting position distributions of winners in each round and starting positions variations of champions along the rounds were analysed. Results show that skaters in the first track were inclined to win the rounds in 500m, 1000m and 1500m (28%, 28% and 22%, respectively) and the differences between starting and finishing positions for champions were minimized in semi-finals, indicating skaters should spare no effort in semi-final to achieve success.