Introduction: Speed skating, being a popular winter sport, imposes significant demands on elite skaters, necessitating their effective assessment and adaptation to diverse environmental factors to achieve optimal race performance.
Objective: The aim of this study was to conduct a thorough analysis of the predominant external factors influencing the performance of elite speed skaters.
Methods: A total of 403 races, encompassing various race distances and spanning from the 2013 to the 2022 seasons, were examined for eight high-caliber speed skaters from the Chinese national team. We developed a comprehensive analytical framework utilizing an advanced back-propagation (BP) neural neural network model to assess three key factors on race performance: ice rink altitude, ice surface temperature, and race frequency.
Results: Our research indicated that the performance of all skaters improves with higher rink altitudes, particularly in races of 1,000 m and beyond. The ice surface temperature can either enhance or impaire performance and varies in its influences based on skaters' technical characteristics, which had a perceptible or even important influence on races of 1,500 m and beyond, and a negligible influence in the 500 m and 1,000 m races. An increase in race frequency generally contributed to better performance. The influence was relatively minor in the 500 m race, important in the 3,000 m race, and varied among individuals in the 1,000 m and 1,500 m races.
Conclusion: The study results offer crucial guidelines for speed skaters and coaches, aiding in the optimization of their training and competition strategies, ultimately leading to improved competitive performance levels.
Keywords: BP neural network; ice rink altitude; ice temperature; race frequency; speed skating.
© 2024 Yang, Ke, Zhang, Du and Hong.