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At this year’s US Open, when 45-year-old tennis great Venus Williams stepped on to the court to play in doubles, it was alongside a teammate who wasn’t even born when Williams won gold in the singles at the Sydney Olympics.
Given that the peak performance age for a tennis player has traditionally been considered to be around the mid-20s, it was an extraordinary feat to be competing at a major, but Williams’ exceptional extension of her athletic career is increasingly common.
The basketball superstar LeBron James this year made history by being the first NBA player to have played in the league from his teens to his 40s, while last year the Australian basketballer Lauren Jackson defied the odds by competing in her fifth Olympics, aged 43.
The 50-year-old Uzbek gymnast Oksana Chusovitina is aiming for her ninth Olympics, and in Japan, Kazuyoshi Miura has broken records by continuing to play elite football – at 58 years old.
These achievements are astounding because at an age when most ordinary mortals are starting to feel the effects of declining muscle mass, reaction times, cognition and stamina, these elite athletes are still performing extraordinary physical feats that put incredible pressure and stress on their ageing bodies. Furthermore, they are doing so in a sporting environment that has continued to push the boundaries of what the unenhanced body can achieve, well beyond what was thought possible, or even safe, just a few decades ago.
So what does it take to be able to keep leaping about a court or charging down a field at an age when many other elite athletes have called it a day and when most non-athletes are happy if they don’t slip over in the shower?
The extraordinary longevity of these elite athletes is down to a mix of genetics, environment and lifestyle, according to associate Prof Christina Ekegren, a physiotherapist and researcher at Monash University in Melbourne.
The Williams sisters, for example, no doubt have great genes, but they have also made the most of them. “The thing about Venus and Serena is that they’ve been training at a very high level from a very young age, so they’re starting out at a very high base level of fitness and strength,” Ekegren says. The younger of the two sisters retired at 40 after a stellar career that spanned decades, but her older sister Venus is still going strong, becoming the oldest competitor to play singles at the US Open this year.
“What differentiates some of the athletes that you’re talking about is they’re very smart in their approach to healthy ageing as an athlete,” says sports and exercise physiotherapist Ben Herde at Grand Slam Physiotherapy in Melbourne.
One of the normal processes of ageing is sarcopenia, or the gradual loss of muscle mass. It happens as a result of changes in hormones, in activity levels, in nutrition and in the muscle structure itself. But it’s not necessarily inevitable, and Herde says there’s increasing emphasis on strength training for older athletes, specifically to combat this decline. “If you compare that to someone who’s not training versus training, just that increased muscle mass will obviously give not only increased power and function, but it will offset the loads that go through the cartilage and the bones and even the neural structures,” he says.
Like most things age-related, it’s a case of “use it or lose it”, Herde says. Elite older athletes are able to keep doing what they do because they don’t stop and let themselves decline.
Athletes who compete for decades also adapt to their changing bodies. They may be more selective about the competitions they enter, or play a different position on the field that exposes them to less risk of damage or demands less of them physically. “If you look at it like Australian rules football, they might have been a really dynamic, hard-running midfielder, and then as they become older, they’ll put themselves into the forward line where there’s less running,” Herde says.
But older athletes aren’t invincible. Despite their carefully maintained strength, agility, body condition and skill, they do inevitably face a greater risk of injury as they age and, like the rest of us, those injuries take longer to heal. Part of remaining at the elite level in older age is taking more time to allow for a proper recovery both from injury and normal training, says Prof Jeremiah Peiffer, professor of exercise science at Murdoch University in Perth.
“A lot of this longevity within sport is because people are able to give the time necessary to recovery,” Peiffer says. “The more time you can give to recovery, the more time you’re not running around doing other stuff, the more likely your body’s going to adapt appropriately.” For example, football star Cristiano Ronaldo, who is still playing at 40, specifically credits scheduled recovery sessions as key to his longevity and achievement, according to Men’s Health.
While elite older athletes are doing all the things the rest of us hear on a regular basis from our doctors and physios – eat well, stay active – they do pay a price for taking that healthy advice to the extreme.
“The paradox to that is that there are a number of things that come with prolonged lifetime high-volume training that can be a bit detrimental as well,” Peiffer says. Elite athletes, particularly those who participate in endurance sports, have a significantly higher risk of irregular heart rhythms in middle age. And there are increased risks of musculoskeletal conditions such as osteoarthritis, especially in athletes who have experienced knee injuries.
Despite the risks and challenges, Ekegren says, it’s important to see older people still excelling on the sports field, and to inspire the rest of us to put a little more effort into keeping up our physical activity.
“We have this stigma in society that we can’t achieve to the same extent as we get older,” she says. “But I think that’s really untrue, and I think it really all comes down to how much you’re doing in your daily life.”
