With age comes wisdom – and wins at Wimbledon
What’s going on at Wimbledon? After years of relentless muscular physicality, the wily old foxes are proving this tournament’s real winners. Experience, nous and élan are beating brute force. We ageing sports fans – with our tennis elbows, gammy knees and dodgy backs – find ourselves cheering on fellow geriatrics like Roger Federer and (for all that she beat our beloved Jo Konta) Venus Williams.
It certainly makes a happy change. Recent tennis has been dominated by Andy Murray’s tree-trunk neck, Rafael Nadal’s Thor-like arm and Novak Djokovic’s gluten-free diet, hyperbaric sleep chamber, and biofeedback devices. So there is something extremely reassuring about the reminder that fitness and cutting-edge sports science are not the be all and end all. Experience still counts for something. In fact, it may be counting for more and more – and not just in tennis.
In recent years, Federer’s three main rivals have all suffered injuries and signs of burnout – hints, perhaps, that they have pushed their bodies too far. Meanwhile, the Swiss – who is clearly fit but not in the vein-bulging fashion of many modern athletes – has eased back his workload, relaxed his attitude, tweaked his backhand and started winning again.
At the start of the year Federer won the Australian Open, his 18th Grand Slam and first after a five-year hiatus. Venus Williams also triumphed in Melbourne – her first Slam in nine years. Federer’s quarter final victory on Wednesday against the 26-year-old world number three Milos Raonic was, well, Man vs Boy; Williams has swatted aside younger rivals throughout the tournament.
Their success feels like part of a wider rediscovery of the benefits of age and experience. There was a famous photo taken in April last year of the G5 leaders – David Cameron, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Matteo Renzi. It was widely noted that by December all but one was out of office, an indication of our febrile political times. Less remarked upon, however, was the fact that it was the oldest of the quintet – Merkel (63 on Monday) – who survived.
When the pantomime of the Liberal Democrats’ leadership contest is over, those in charge of Britain’s three main political parties will all be older than their predecessors by some considerable margin.
It reverses a recent trend in which, even as the UK’S population has aged, its politicians and FTSE 100 bosses have got younger. Youthful vim is fine. But by definition, younger politicians and executives lack the long view that can help them deal with the vagaries of the economic and business cycle.
It’s no bad thing if employers are reminded of the perspective and talents of oldies, or if those youngsters coming down from their athletic peak realise that there is a second, third or fourth golden period to come, as our lives stretch ever longer, like the evening shadows across Centre Court.