Four to seven skaters set off together on a 111.12 metre oval marked out on an ice hockey rink, with no lanes, no staggered start and nothing to stop them touching each other. Whoever crosses the line first wins. Everything strange about the sport follows from those two facts.
Long track speed skating is a time trial: two skaters, separate lanes, the clock decides. Short track is a race. The clock records what happened but it does not decide anything — a skater can set the fastest time of the day in a semifinal and still go home, and a skater can win a final in a time that would have been last in the heats. What is being measured is who got to the line first, and that turns out to be a completely different sport.
Two thirds of that lap is corner. A skater is leaning over at forty-odd degrees with a hand on the ice for most of the race, and while leaning it is very hard to change direction. That is the whole tactical problem: you can only really pass on the straight or on the entry to a corner, and there are only two of each per lap. In a 500 m — four and a half laps — that is a handful of opportunities in about forty seconds.
It also explains the contact. The inside line is shorter, so everyone wants it, and there is no rule that gives it to anybody. Skaters are not permitted to push, block or impede — but they are permitted to be in the way, and the difference between the two is a judgement made by a referee watching a replay.
Every distance is the same 111.12 m lap, repeated. That is why the numbers look odd: 500 m is four and a half laps, 1000 m is nine, 1500 m is thirteen and a half. The relays are 2000 m mixed (18 laps), 3000 m for women (27) and 5000 m for men (45).
They are not the same event with more laps, though. We measured this across every race with lap-by-lap positions on file: in the 500 m, the skater leading from the first lap goes on to win 69% of the time. In the 1500 m, the skater leading with 12 laps to go wins 15% of the time — which is what a skater picked at random from the same field would score. Leading early in a 1500 m tells you nothing at all. The full curve, distance by distance.
Skaters are drawn into heats of four to seven and the field narrows — heats, quarterfinals, semifinals, then two finals. Winning your race qualifies you; a set number of further places qualify directly, and only if those do not fill the next round are the fastest losers added. The A final decides the medals; the B final decides the places below it, and the skaters in it are still competing, which broadcasters routinely get wrong. How the rounds actually work.
A penalty removes a skater from the result of that race. A yellow card removes their results for the whole distance. A red card does the same and is reserved for extreme behaviour. But the rule that matters most runs the other way: a skater who was impeded, where somebody else was sanctioned for it, and who was first or second at the moment it happened, is advanced to the next round — which can make a final bigger than it should be, and can take a fastest-loser place away from somebody in another heat. What actually gets called.
Everything on this site is computed from the ISU's own results database: 164 competitions, every round of every distance, with finishing times, penalties, and a link into the ISU livestream at the second a race starts wherever one was published. The lap-by-lap positions behind the leading figures above begin in 2021/2022, which is when the ISU started publishing them.