Sport’s star drivers beginning to fade away

Jeff Gordon is working in the broadcast booth. Carl Edwards is spending timewith family. Tony Stewart is hanging out at dirt tracks.

Some of NASCAR’s biggest stars have stepped away over the last 15months, a thoughtprovoking trend that doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

Gordon (2015) and Stewart (2016) retired from fulltime racing in consecutive years, walking away with a combined seven championships. Edwards called it quits last month, abruptly leaving before the final year of his contract with Joe Gibbs Racing. Edwards said his decision was personal and private. What made it so bizarre is that Edwards was 10 laps away from winning his first championship just two months earlier.

Even if Edwards returns to the series next year, it probably won’t do much to stop NASCAR’s ongoing face-lift.

“When I first started watching the ( Washington) Redskins, a lot of wide receivers and cornerbacks were playing into their mid-30s regularly and now they’re not,” NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr. told The Associated Press this week. “Nowadays, at 30, they’re starting to look for somebody else and wondering how much more mileage they got on them.

“I think we’re seeing that in NASCAR as well.”

Other aspects of the issue, Earnhardt said, include drivers starting racing careers much younger than ever and the constant demands on those who reach NASCAR’s pinnacle, the Monster Energy Cup Series.

Earnhardt estimated about 90 sponsor or team commitments during the series’ 36-race schedule, leaving little room for downtime, family time or me time.

“Back in the 70s and 80s, when guys were racing into their 50s, theywere running 28 races and had a lot of time off,” he said. “They didn’t have sponsor responsibilities. Ninety days of work off the track? What was Bobby Allison doing in ‘ 83 with Miller? Twelve days off the track, maybe? They had a lot of time to do what they wanted to do to unplug and keep their battery charged.”