Seasoned Olympians
THE TEENS ARE GREAT BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OVER-50 CROWD?
Japan’s 13-year-old gold medal-winning skateboarding trickster Momiji Nishiya and 12-year-old Syrian table tennis phenom Hend Zaza might just be the ticket to help draw a younger crowd to watch future Olympics.
At the other end of the spectrum, though, it’s the skills that might make cowboys and cowgirls proud — riding horses and shooting guns — that has some Olympians believing you’re never too old to keep competing at the Games.
Australia is being represented by dressage rider and grandmother Mary Hanna, who just happens to be 54 years older than Zaza.
“I don’t know what to do with myself, I’ve been doing this for so long now,” Hanna told the Australian Associated Press.
She’s not done yet, either. Hanna has her eyes on competing in an eighth Olympics at Paris in 2024, when she will be 69 years young.
Hanna has said she was inspired by Japanese rider Hiroshi Hoketsu, who was 71 when he competed in the London Olympics in 2012.
In keeping with that theme, the oldest Canadian competing in Tokyo is 56-year-old show jumper Mario Deslauriers, who may also have established a national record for longest time between Olympic appearances. Deslauriers was 19 when he attended the Los Angeles Olympics, but hasn’t been back to the five-ring circus since taking part in the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Nino Salukvadze, a 52-year-old from Georgia, is taking part in her 10th Olympics in pistol shooting.
They don’t have anything on the legacy of Sweden’s Oscar Gomer Swahn. Swahn, who competed in the long gone Olympic sport of running deer shooting, is the oldest Olympic competitor, taking part in the 1920 Olympics when he was 72. He is also the oldest Olympian to have won a gold (60, in 1908) and a medal of any kind, claiming a silver at the age of 64 in 1912.
While female gymnastics is often the domain for teenagers, one of the compelling early stories of the Tokyo Games has surrounded 46-year-old artistic gymnast Oksana Chusovitina of Uzbekistan, who took part in the vault in her eighth, and what she has said will be her final, Olympics.
Chusovitina has won a pair of Olympic medals along the way, including a silver while competing in 2008 for Germany.
Clearly, the young and the young at heart can both serve as role models for future Olympians.