So I have now built a view that was less trivial than I had hoped to display a list of non-duplicated entries, each being the name of a skater who participated in a selected competition.
The view is named "Competition_Participants". The crux of this is in getting the concept of "arguments" correct. The key aspects of the build do not depend on "relationships". You need only add a single filter, which is to select all content of type competition performance. You have to add only one field: "Content: Skater User Name - (field_skater_id) Default". But the argument is very important. It is only "too obvious" now, but I add an argument that validates based on competition and set it for validating on only the "node ID". I can then embed this in the page for any competition and static encode the node ID of the competition itself on the page.
As of now, I cannot figure out how to elminate the duplicates. Oh well, it will have to wait.
