So the last will be the first 

So the last will be the first

It is well known that different competition formats in sports result in different conditions for the athletes. For example, it is well known that average effort provided by equally skilled athletes decreases with the number of participants in a winner take all contest. Some tournament types base ranking on some absolute measure of performance, so essentially all athletes compete against each other, even though they may not compete simultaneously. In such a case, incentives are similar to the ones in a single rank order tournament, and so is effort provided. In such tournaments, information and peer effects may be influence performance of the individual athlete. In this paper we focus on speed skating and address the question to what extend skaters respond to the information available. We find a small and significant effect of the best time skated so far: if the best time skated so far decreases by 1 second, performance of the skater improves by approximately 0.17%-0.42% (depending on the specification). Even though this effect appears to be very small, it may be significant as the time difference between top places of important tournaments may be tiny.