Association between hip–knee–ankle coordination control characteristics during turning and previous lower-limb injury history in adolescent short-track speed skaters: a retrospective cross-sectional study

Cornering in short-track speed skating places extreme demands on hip-knee-ankle coordination in adolescent athletes, yet validated injury risk screening tools for this population remain lacking. This retrospective cross-sectional study compared lower-limb function, motor control, and biomechanical indicators between 126 adolescent skaters (58 with a prior injury, 68 without), and used least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO)-binary logistic regression (10-fold cross-validation, λ.min) for variable selection and to construct a screening model. Because all functional and biomechanical assessments were performed at a single time point and reflect the athletes’ current functional status, whereas the injury outcome is previous injury history within the 12 months preceding the assessment, the findings of this study support only an association between these characteristics and previous injury history and cannot be used to infer causal or prospective predictive relationships. Hip adduction control deficit (OR = 2.364, 95% CI: 1.825–3.062) and ankle postural imbalance (OR = 2.117, 95% CI: 1.631–2.748) were identified as factors independently associated with previous injury history. The model showed a concordance index (C-index) of 0.853, 0.849 after bootstrap correction; the calibration slope was 0.942, the calibration intercept was −0.031, and the Brier score was 0.158, indicating good discrimination with limited overfitting. The AUC was 0.846 (95% CI 0.789–0.903) for the primary 12-month outcome and 0.872 (95% CI 0.815–0.929) in a sensitivity analysis using the 6-month outcome; decision curve analysis showed that the model achieved net benefit across the 15–85% threshold probability range. These findings indicate that hip-knee-ankle coordination deficits are significantly associated with previous lower-limb injury history in adolescent short-track speed skaters; the screening model constructed here can provide a basis for external validation and prospective cohort studies, although its application in routine screening and public health programmes still awaits prospective evaluation.