Section 7: Violations & Penalties
7.1 Racing Infringements
Rule 295, paragraph 2.b) names five sanctionable infringement categories — Off-Track, Impeding, Assistance, Kicking-Out, and Embellishment — applied when the facts are clear and obvious and no shared responsibility needs to be established. Detailed descriptions of each category are published in the ISU Communication "Guidance to the Racing Rules." Where a contact or situation is created by the simultaneous actions of two or more Skaters and has only a minor, non-result-affecting impact, the Referee may instead find Shared Responsibility, resulting in no penalty to any Skater or Team (Rule 296, paragraph 1.c).
7.2 Relay Infringements
Rule 295, paragraph 4.b) defines Relay-specific breaches: Relaying Non-Touch (a relay exchange completed without a touch), Relaying During the Last Two Laps (the final exchange not clearly completed on the straight before the first block of the final two laps), and, in Mixed Team Relay, failure to follow the fixed exchange schedule described in Section 5.4.
7.3 Sanctions (Rule 296)
Rule 296, paragraph 1.b) defines three tiers of sanction. A Penalty applies to an infringement of the Racing Rules. A Yellow Card applies to an unsafe, unsportsmanlike, harmful or hazardous offence, or to more than one Penalty-triggering infringement of Impeding and/or Kicking-Out committed independently of each other in the same race. A Red Card is imposed for an infringement deemed dangerous or grossly negligent, when a Skater is shown two Yellow Cards in the same Event, or for a violation of the ISU Code of Ethics occurring between the Skater's appearance at the Heat Box In and leaving the Heat Box Out after a race.
A Skater or Relay Team given a Penalty or a Yellow Card is disqualified from the race in which the infringement occurred and excluded from the next round of that distance/competition (Rule 296, paragraph 1.d & f). A Skater given a Red Card is not allowed to participate in any further race of the Event, in either Individual or Relay competition, and loses all results on the distance concerned, though results of other individual distances already concluded with a Final are unaffected (Rule 296, paragraph 1.h). If a Skater accumulates two Red Cards within 12 months, that Skater is automatically suspended from all ISU Events, the Olympic Winter Games, the Winter Youth Olympic Games, and International Competitions for at least two months or three applicable Competitions, whichever is longer (Rule 296, paragraph 1.m).
In the ISU Short Track World Tour, a Cumulative Penalty System applies (Rule 296, paragraph 1.e): a Skater who accumulates 3 sanctions (Penalty for Impeding or Kicking-Out, Yellow Card, or Red Card) in the Series cannot be entered in their highest-ranked distance at the next Event of the Series; at 5 sanctions, the Skater cannot be entered in their two highest-ranked distances; from the 7th sanction onward, the Skater cannot be entered in any individual distance at the next Event. Relay infringements do not count toward this total. The list of accumulated sanctions is published in the Protocol after each Event and resets to zero at the end of the Series.
Referee decisions on whether an infringement of the Racing Rules or the ISU Code of Ethics occurred, or that no infringement occurred, are final; no protests against such decisions are allowed (Rule 296, paragraph 1.n).
7.4 False Start Sanctions
Under the "0 False Start" procedure that applies by default at ISU Events, the Olympic Winter Games, and the Winter Youth Olympic Games, any False Start draws an immediate Penalty and exclusion from that race — there is no first-offense grace period (Rule 294, paragraphs 5 & 9–11). Only International Competitions that specifically announce the optional one-free-False-Start procedure retain a warning-then-penalty sequence, in which a Skater's second personal warning for "delaying the start," or any False Start once the race has already used its one permitted False Start, results in a Penalty and exclusion (Rule 294, paragraphs 14, 19 & 20).