Masters Records Stats 2011/2018 – Part 1, General findings

 This is a different approach to racing stats: rather than listing times and names, I wanted to check globally what’s going on with our movement, in terms of participation and overall performance.

First and foremost, I must express our gratitude to Mr. John McClennan, webmaster and owner of SpeedskatingResults.com , definitely our most valued reference source. John was kind enough to provide us the database of all records established in masters’ competitions from season 2011-2012 to season 2017-2018. Although I have no doubts whatsoever in John’s accuracy, he warns us about the following issues:

• Many skaters are not registered by date of birth (or their information wrong or incomplete) so it is possible that a few personal records are misplaced, or simply not accounted for.
• Only competitions labeled as “Masters” are considered; mixed events are not.

The analytical tools used to accomplish this piece are courtesy of my chaps at REVVA, a business intelligence platform mainly for the travel trade, but useful for any data endeavour.

For this study purposes I intended to learn what’s our movement general health, considering the amount of records per season a reasonable indicator. A debatable choice, of course, but I am open to suggestions, if anybody has the data to get insights otherwise. Please note, all type of registered race record is included in the census: PB, SB, MI (Masters’ International) … and all possible combinations of them (see here for details: http://speedskatingresults.com/index.php?p=9). There are even some track records!

I was ready to present all insights in a single article, but as per Sven-Åge Svensson’s advice, in order to avoid overwhelming readers with too much data, I’ll divide this paper in three chapters.  

On this one I’ll illustrate the general findings, that -to be honest- are not very surprising. But one thing is to “guesstimate” things and numbers, and another is to actually identify data-backed facts. For instance, we all know that the Netherlands, given its sheer number of skaters, of course would be the largest record-producing nation…

However, now we can state that, in the past seven seasons, NED skaters established more records that NOR and GER combined (2^nd and 3^rd record producers). Russia, the 4^th most prolific nation, has more than twice the records made by its two immediate followers (USA and CAN). And I am surprised to find that ITA places itself at the 7^th sport, with a slightly higher number of records than Finland.

Of course, male skaters are consistently more than female ones, and that’s clearly illustrated by the number of records established by sex: less than a third for the ladies. However, there are quite a few surprises when we deeply analyze records by gender. That’s for my next report.

As for venues, Erfurt and Inzell are by far our most prolific sources of records, being Herenveen only third. Baselga, a usually dismissed track for it’s seemingly poor outdoor conditions, comes solidly in fourth, surpassing Hamar, none the less.

Finally, as for number of records on single races, 2012 Sprint Games in Thialf boasts first place with a whopping 847, being Erfurt’s MAG on the same season third with 755. What did we eat that year, I wonder? Since then, things went downwards, only to recover a bit in this past season thanks to Baselga’s MAG and… NED National Champs in Groningen!

OK, that’s about it for this time. In my next article I’ll delve deeper on age classes and gender; on the last one I’ll show insights about records by country and venue.

Thanks for reading!

Marcello Bresin