The increased performance densities in the top of elite sports, sometimes mutual contest results are within the error margins of the measuring sys-tems, has caused major problems in comparing performances and deciding on winners. In case of Dutch speed skating, the pool of highly competitive athletes is large, and, since there is a limit on the number of Olympic participators per country, the Olympic selection procedure is obviously a precarious affair. Because more than 100 years of data is available, we are able to study in this respect the well-known Gould hypothesis: When the sport matures, the variation in performance, especially at the top, decreases, and extreme events, where one athlete outperforms all his competitors, be-come rarer. Since Gould's hypothesis only holds with 'unchanged rules of the game', several data corrections, for example on the introduction of the klap skate, are needed. A major goal of this paper is to analyze the possible role of Gould's hypothesis concerning the growing performance densities for top speed skating.
SummaryDuring the Olympic Games and the World Championships Single Distances the 1000m is skated by every skater only one time. However, there may be a difference in skating a 1000m race with a start in the inner and the outer lane that introduces an externality that introduces unfairness. We show that this difference indeed exists. For the period 2000-2009 we observe a statistically significant advantage of starting in the inner lane of 0.120 seconds for women. For male skater the difference between starting lanes is 0.030, but not significantly different from zero. In order to make the competition fair, we suggest that the 1000m should be skated twice.
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