Any similar circumstances and rule changes regarding this kind of strategy in races specifically? Is a marathoner not allowed to start a race off with an initial sprint? Because most complex, adversarial team sports that are based largely on how you’re allowed to interact with other players don’t seem especially applicable to this situation.
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Those aren’t the rules. It’s an article on an NBC website. As to your question, I have no idea if they’ve left anything out - I don’t know anything about the rules for speed skating. I’m willing to bet, though, that that is just a summary.
A quick Google search turned up this: https://www.isu.org/speed-skating/rules/ssk-regulations-rules/file. I think this is probably closer to the actual rules.
It’s almost 90 pages long.
And yet you opened this discussion by declaring that this move isn’t in the spirit of the sport. Interesting.
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You don’t understand how the rules of a sport and the spirit are two entirely different things?
I have a hard time believing that anyone who confesses that they know nothing about the rules of a sport is in any position to lecture others about the spirit of the sport.
Plus it’s a freaking race. If the point isn’t to go faster than the other racers then what is the point?
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I really don’t know, and I don’t know why you are pressing me on this issue. It was simply a comment that similar things in other sports have led to rule changes.
Alright, now you’re misquoting me. I did not declare anything. I said “not in the spirit of the sport, I’d say” (emphasis mine). All but the most pedantic of readers would agree that I’m expressing an opinion, not a fact.
Yeah this strikes me as a tactic rather than cheating in any way. Now collusion between teammates, where one sets an impossible pace early on to wear down competitors while the other skates at a pace that they can complete the race might be cheating, but this doesn’t sound like that.
The video makes it pretty clear that this isn’t considered cheating. Though it does sound like the 1st and 2nd place winners had worked out this strategy in advance, which maybe one could call collusion.
To make another baseball analogy, at lower levels of Little League it’s not uncommon to see a player take two bases on a walk. It’s perfectly legal; after four balls, the batter is awarded first base and can’t be put out before she gets there. But the ball remains live and all the bases are fair game, so if the defensive team isn’t paying attention it’s pretty easy to just steal second before they figure out what’s happening and throw you out. As you move up the divisions, pitchers and catchers tighten up their rhythm and there’s no space for that to happen. Even in the (professional) minor leagues anyone who tried that would be dead in the water - they wouldn’t have a chance.
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Positive- vs negative-splits, both valid racing strategies seen in many events including cycling and running. It is a gamble and can end in a humiliating defeat for the positive-split competitor, but if the rest of the field does not pay attention.
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Running the first two thirds of the race slowly is a tactic, so going ahead one lap is a valid tactic as well. the ingenious part here is not winning the gold, once the skater was one lap ahead and had time to catch a breath that was already going to happen. But the other skaters got confused by the last lap bell, sprinted a lap too early and ran out of breath while the 2nd place actually kept track of the laps and sprinted for the silver. Perfectly valid, and I don’t really see a need to change the rules. What they could do is introduce something like a buzzer tone for second and third place’s final lap, if they think this will avoid confusion. But when you try to win using tactics you can’t complain if your competitor has better tactics.
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Every sporting endeavor – in fact, every system with formal rules and variable outcomes for participants (*) – to a certain extent ends up becoming a competition between the participants and the ruleset. Success-motivated participants tend to seek strategic and tactical benefit in the ambiguities, edge cases, and unforeseen situations. And once exploits are found, the formalists who organize the system may (or may not) make a rules change to prevent or add strictures to that exploit.
This is more or less how the rules of baseball ended up the way they are; every weird rule is a patch to try to prevent behavior that the commission sees as antithetical to the spirit of the sport or to fair play. It’s the prerogative of the governing bodies to decide how those boundaries shift, though it happens not without input from the participants (and the fans!).
There’s also a gray area of “legal, but shitty” that arises in lots of sports. There are informal structures of power and community at play that can serve to make certain practices off-limits, or at least very rare, even when permitted by the rules – because they’d lead to opprobrium within the in-group. There’s a nice example from Sumo called the henka: a side-step dodge at the face-off that’s legal but considered bad form by wrestlers and fans alike. I suspect that this technique probably lives in this category in the speed-skating community.
Anyway, my point is that the whole thing about sports as a formal system is that the whole structure exists to define common boundaries of acceptable behavior. There’s plenty of space to argue that this sort of move is in the spirit of the sport or not, and whether it should be legal or not, but the final determination of its status is really up to the formal and informal power structures in the sport community. It’s not really as simple as saying “this is clearly a legitimate tactic and should obviously be legal” – or the inverse – without understanding the organizational culture of the sport.
(* See also: the invention of Uber and AirBnB, the American Legislative Exchange Council, etc.)
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Disappointed that it wasn’t three skaters in a trench-coat.
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As an American, I can respect a quality trick. We rip each other off just to stay in practice. Bravo teenage Chinese skaters.
Rollerball, maybe.
This is a great analogy, actually: It’s a strategy that’s within the rules and only works against opponents who lack skill/experience to counter it.
But it still feels kind of icky when pushed to an extreme. One of my kids was on a Little League team with a coach who encouraged the kids to take ridiculously big lead-offs and steal bases at every opportunity (including on walks). It was a perfectly legal and very successful strategy at that level: steals (and of course overthrows by the other team) accounted for most of their runs and they won almost every game. But the other teams’ players, coaches and parents all HATED it. They felt it was unsportsmanlike, encouraging kids to win by exploiting others’ weakness rather than by developing their own strengths. I’m not sure they would have felt that way if it had just been the occasional steal on a walk. But combining that with big lead-offs (that sometimes had a taunting character) on almost every play did not win friends for our team. It also made the games take forever.
Of course, our neighborhood Little League (which prioritizes fun and sportsmanship and inclusivity) isn’t exactly the Youth Olympics in terms of what’s at stake…
Another analogy would be the (in)famous Ross Chastain wall ride a couple years ago, which NASCAR later clarified would be banned going forward: https://us.motorsport.com/nascar-cup/news/ross-chastain-wall-ride-hail-melon-martinsville-2023/10538315/
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NASCAR had a very justifiable reason to ban that maneuver: it’s clearly unsafe.
As for the baseball rules that people keep bringing up, racing is a very, very different type of sport and I just don’t think it’s a relevant comparison at all.
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My kid is a short-track speed skater, and this race was the topic of discussion amongst parents and coaches at practice the other night. Generally the sentiment was that this was perfectly fine and within the spirit of the sport, but that it was unlikely to be employed successfully on a routine basis. Obviously it worked because it was completely unexpected.
The act of going out that hard to build almost a full lap lead on everyone still required a lot of athleticism. There is benefit of drafting in short track, but not enough to make it your primary strategy (it requires keeping very close to the skater in front, which increases the risk that you will cause/be involved in a crash. It’s also not conducive to outside passing). The 1500 m is the second longest distance in international competition at this level, so it was still impressive that the skater “kept up” to the pack for the rest of the race.
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Entirely valid use of strategy. I don’t see the problem in any sense of sporting. She just decides to do her sprint portion of the race before everyone else 
Tactically, though, I’d be tempted to jockey a bit in the middle of the pack to get everyone focusing on keeping me from lapping them again, just so they’d forget what had happened. Clearly it wasn’t needed here, but it’d be a fun head game.
