Why going faster is not enough to break a world record
Did you know that during the last World Championship the 100m sprint record wasn’t the only record that has been broken?
There is another race that has seen the skaters cover a distance faster than anyone else before, but it seems that no one noticed it.
Well, we did.
And we are here to share with you our latest Inline Speed Skating World Record Analysis.
The race
If your are still wondering what race attracted our attention, you can start from the analysis we have published on the @speed_skating_data profile a couple of months ago.
At the start of the season, the World Skate (inline Speed Skating organisation) replaced the 10000m points race event with the new 5000m distance. In addition to halving the distance, the new race format is characterised by the fact that points are assigned every lap (for more information about the different race formats, check our blog article).
Such a hard race was speculated to produce very fast and tactical races and the expectations were not disappointed.
During the 2024 European Championship in Ostend, the race time for the senior men final was stopped by Daniel Niero at 6 minutes and 51 seconds, setting a new world record for the distance!
After that race, it was easy to hypothesise that the World Skate Games that would take place two months after would lead to another incredible fast race.
Once again the expectations were not disappointed.
The World Championship 5000m final was one of the fastest race ever seen with incredible athletes offering their best performance, but the official race time was a “disappointing” 7.08.136.
But if you look at the race (here you can find the race video), a 17-seconds gap seems almost impossible, considering the tactics and the starting list.
So, is it possible to have a faster race with slower times?
To answer this question, there are four variables that must be taken into account:
Race Tactics
Athletes’ performance level
Technical advantage
Track Features
Race Tactics
The first thing that can influence a race time is the race tactic. Races can be characterised by long-range breakaways that can potentially slow down the final race time if the group is not organised to chase the breakaway. Similarly, some skaters that are able to reach very high max speeds multiple times during a race can exploit the slipstream offered by other skaters and only sprint to secure points, contributing to slowing down the average speed of the race. This was not the case for the World Championship 5000m points race which saw multiple breakaways attempts and a great effort from the skater pack to stay close to the different breakaways.
Athletes’ Performance Level
The 2024 European Championship saw some of the most incredible skaters sharing the track and competing at extremely high level. Nonetheless, the World Championship is the most important event of the season and all the best athletes give their best to come to the event in their best shape. So we can exclude from our equation this variable too.
Technical Advantage
No new technical innovation was adopted for the European Championship compared to the world championship that can explain a performance gap.
The “Track Problem”
The last remaining variable left to analyse is the difference between the two tracks. Let’s have a look at it.
Track Length and width
Both tracks measure 200 meters and the skaters were required to cover 25 laps and 50 corners to cover the 5000m distance.
Even the track width is 6 meters for the two tracks.
Track Surface
Once again, both tracks were equipped with the same Duraflex 101sp roller professional synthetic resin produced by the Italian company Vesmaco.
Corner Geometry
Here we can finally find the key differences between the two tracks.
The Ostend Track features two 13.5m-radius corner while the Montesilvano track was designed to feature sharper (12.5m radius) corners.
Perhaps even more important from a skater perspective, the Belgian track corners present a constant banking while the Italian counterpart adopted a different approach with a parabolic banking.
These two key differences alone can explain the time gap between the two competition.
A detailed article on the difference between a flat-banking and a parabolic-banking corner is already scheduled to be published in future on our blog.
The only thing we need to know for now is that a parabolic track, especially when paired with narrower corners, forces athletes to adopt wider trajectories, resulting in a longer actual distance covered. So…
…a 5000m race is almost never 5000m long
Some Numbers
Doing some simple calculations, racing following an optimal trajectory (as close as possible to the inner track edge) on the Ostend track means covering:
42.39 m on each corner
57.61 m on each straight
On the Montesilvano track, the same approach results in:
39.25 m each corner
60.75 m each straight
Let’s now imagine to skate on the worst possible trajectory, staying 6 meters away from the line during the entire lap. The straight length will remain the same, but the actual distance covered on the corner will become:
61.23 meters in Ostend
58.09 meters in Montesilvano
In both tracks the second skater will cover 18.84 m more at every corner.
So now, a single lap length is not 200m anymore, but 237.68 meters instead. And our 5000m race is now almost a 1000 meters (5942m) longer! A huge 18.84% difference!
How long were the two races?
Of course, just as it is impossible to see a skater racing on the inner line for the entire race, it would be equally strange to see someone racing close to the barriers for the entire race.
Once again, this is not a corner trajectory seminar, we just need to know that in some tracks it is an easier and better option to skate as close to the line as possible, while in other tracks a wider corner trajectory is advantageous.
In particular, in tracks featuring flat-banking corners, the group stays as close as possible to the inner track limits, while parabolic corners see skaters prefering wider trajectories.
If you want to check on your own, here you can find the link to the entire Ostend (http://speedskate.tv/index.php?cmd=showmedia&mid=41123) and Montesilvano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wco6pEedWbY&t=509s) races.
We made our calculation and estimated a mean lap length of 207 meters for the 2024 European Championship in Ostend and a 219m mean lap length for the World Championship 5000m race.
So now we know that the actual race distance for the first race was approximately 5175m while, at the world championships, the athletes covered 5475m; a lap and a half more!
Lap-by-lap Analyisis Ostend
Lap-by-lap Analysis Montesilvano
Let’s talk about speed
Now that we know the estimated actual race distance for each event and the final time, we can say that, although the race time in Ostend suggested a fastest race compared to the 5000m final at the World Championships, the average speeds calculated taking into consideration the trajectory deficit for each track were:
45.32 km/h (12.59 m/s) for the European Championship (current world record)
46.05 km/h (12.79 m/s) for the World Championship final
As hypothesised by everyone, the World Championship race was actually faster the the European Championship.
We can now play with numbers and see what race times can be clocked at those speeds.
If an average speed of 46.05km/h is maintained for 5175m (the actual distance calculated for the Ostend track), a new world record would have been set at…
6 minutes and 44 seconds!
Finally we can use the same average speed and calculate how much time would take for a skater to cover the exact race distance (5000m) to calculate what we will call the Speed Skating Data World Record. The results are impressive!
With a mean speed of 45.32 km/h (the one calculated for the 2024 European Championship) a skater would cover 5000m in 6 minutes and 37 seconds.
A 46.05 km/h average speed would guarantee a skater to stop the clock in just:
Speed Skating Data world record
6:31
20 seconds faster than the current fastest ever 5000m race!
Conclusion
This simple analysis shows how little we know our sport and how much technology can help us improve as coaches, skaters, and community.
Having the ability to track instant speeds with precision is something very difficult in inline speed skating but the SSD team is already testing some interesting approaches to reach this target.
Did you know that a 1m difference in corner radius can have a such an impact on the race time?
Sometimes we go on a track, do some tests and say: “This Track is fast!” or “My local track is too slow, I won’t ever be able to compete at higher levels”. Sometimes it can be true, but in 2024 seems like looking at the stopwatch is not enough anymore.
I would like to conclude with an open question.
“In light of this analysis, would you rather be a world champion or a world record holder?”
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