Inner-Outer Lane Advantage in Olympic 1000 Meter Speed Skating

Summary During the Olympic Games and the World Championships Single Distances the 1000m is skated by every skater only one time. However, there may be a difference in skating a 1000m race with a start in the inner and the outer lane that introduces an externality that introduces unfairness. We show that this difference indeed exists. For the period 2000-2009 we observe a statistically significant advantage of starting in the inner lane of 0.120 seconds for women. For male skater the difference between starting lanes is 0.030, but not significantly different from zero. In order to make the competition fair, we suggest that the 1000m should be skated twice.