The World Sprint Speed Skating Championships are annual speed skating championships. The championships are held over a two-day period, with the skaters racing one 500 m and one 1,000 m each day. Since the higher speeds towards the end of the race tend to favour the skater who skates the last outer lane, each skater starts both distances once in the inner lane and once in the outer lane. The times on those distances are then converted to points using the samalog system, and the skaters are then ranked according to the least amount of points. The International Skating Union has organised the World Sprint Championships for Men and the World Sprint Championships for Women since 1970 and both are held at the same time and venue. The first two years (1970-1971), they were called the ISU Sprint Championships.
Read more about World Sprint Speed Skating Championships: Notes
Famous quotes containing the words world, speed and/or skating:
“If all the world could have seen ‘t, the woe had been universal.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)