Tactical positioning in short-track speed skating: The utility of race-specific athlete-opponent interactions

HEXT, Andrew, HETTINGA, Florentina and MCINERNEY, Ciarán (2022). Tactical positioning in short-track speed skating: The utility of race-specific athlete-opponent interactions. European Journal of Sport Science.

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Abstract

In short-track speed skating, tactical positioning is essential for success as the race format (head-to-head) prioritises finishing position over finishing time. At present, our understanding of this phenomenon is based on measuring the similarity between athletes’ intermediate and final rankings. However, as this approach groups athlete performances across races, each lap’s estimate of tactical importance ignores the athlete-opponent interactions specific to each race. Here, we examine the utility of racespecific athlete-opponent interactions for investigating tactical positioning. Using intermediate and final rankings of elite 1,000 m short-track speed skating competitors collected from 2010/11 to 2017/18 (n = 6,196, races = 1,549), we compared the current method to a novel approach that accounted for race-specific athlete-opponent interactions. This approach first applied the current method to each race independently before using these values to form (1) discrete, empirical distributions of each lap’s tactical importance and (2) race-specific tactical positioning sequences. Our results showed that accounting for race-specific athlete-opponent interactions provided a higher measurement granularity (i.e., level of detail) for investigating tactical positioning in short-track speed skating, which better captured the complexity of the phenomenon. We observed 61 different tactical positioning behaviours and 1,269 unique tactical positioning sequences compared to the current approach’s nine-point estimates of tactical positioning importance. For this reason, we recommend that researchers and practitioners account for race-specific athlete-opponent interactions in the future as it offers a deeper understanding of tactical positioning that will enhance both strategic and tactical decisions.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0913 Mechanical Engineering; 1106 Human Movement and Sports Sciences; Sport Sciences
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2022.2069513
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2022 11:02
Last Modified:	23 May 2022 16:31
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/30131

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