Ailsa Harvey
Speed skating is a competitive form of ice skating which involves competitors racing on the ice. There are different distances to compete at: long track speed skating, short track speed skating and marathon speed skating. The standard rink for long track is 400 meters long, but sometimes shorter tracks are used.
The first sign of speed skating can be traced back over a millennium to Scandinavia, Northern Europe and the Netherlands, where natives added bones to their shoes and skated across frozen bodies of water. Ice skating is thought to always have been an activity of joy rather than transport.
