Why sporting champions are getting older

We pay a lot of lip service to the lessons that sport can teach: perseverance, teamwork, composure — and sometimes those actually manifest. The greatest lesson, though, might be consistency

Irecently strained my rotator cuff, and I blame a pair of Olympic swimmers and Cirque du Soleil for the pain. I have been inspired of late by several sports-comeback heroes in their mid- to late 30s: Tom Brady leading the Patriots to an improbable Super Bowl win; Roger Federer overcoming Rafael Nadal in a decisive fifth set in the Australian Open to secure his 18th Grand Slam title. Others have remained dominant well into their 30s — Serena Williams won her 23rd Grand Slam singles championship at 35, also at the Australian Open, defeating her 36-year-old sister in the final.

Here’s the thing: We actually shouldn’t be so surprised. When athletes train consistently, recover smartly and get a little lucky, there’s no physiological reason their bodies should fall off a cliff in their 30s.

My curiosity was piqued last summer during the Rio Olympics, when I saw this headline: “Michael Phelps Faces His Toughest Challenger Yet — Age.” Old Man Phelps was 31.

I was talking about aging athletes with Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, and we were both struck by the coverage of Olympic athletes beyond their 20s. You’d have thought Phelps needed a walker to get poolside, not that he would win enough gold to forge a breastplate. So, I decided to look into misperceptions of how athletes age. I called Dean Kriellaars, physiologist to Cirque du Soleil. He has decades of data on acrobats and gymnasts (some are former Olympians) who have performed thousands of physically rigorous shows. They wear biometric vests that track their activity, and their aging defies common medical wisdom.

Typical adults start losing bone density after 30, but Kriellaars works with performers pushing 60, who have yet to experience any decline. By that age, they have added some fat no matter how active they are, but many have barely lost muscle. “We have a 58-yearold female banquine artist,” Kriellaars told me, referring to a discipline that’s like cheerleading crossed with aerial gymnastics, “and we have her doing the same thing as a 20-year-old gymnast.” Her husband is one of the banquine “porters” who throws acrobats around, and he’s over 60, “and ripped.”

Kriellaars himself is in his 50s and tries to learn a new sport or skill every year. After the interview, I resolved to do the same. But what sport?

I stumbled upon a YouTube video on the “planche,” a gymnastic move. You put your palms on the ground and suspend your body parallel to the floor. It seemed challenging — I was sold.

I was a runner in college, and have continued that exercise, but I would need to regain some upper-body strength to manage a planche. I started with a strength routine: a push-up pyramid. One person does a push-up, and a partner follows suit, and then the first person does two, and so on up to some number and back down to one. It involves 100 push-ups at minimum, and you have to wait in the up position while your partner takes his turn. If he gets tired, you spend a long time in the up position waiting to go. I was going to make it a little easier in my old, post-Phelpsian mid-30s, by just counting out the push-ups my partner would have done, without accounting for him getting tired.

I turned on some motivational music and got to work. I was about halfway through my first pyramid when I realised I was feeling something more than simple fatigue. The next morning, I needed help slipping into a shirt, and couldn’t rotate my shoulder back far enough to put a jacket on. I had strained my right rotator cuff. It’s an injury more often suffered by elderly people who use their arms to get out of a chair. “Welcome to premiddle age!” Joyner told me. My first thought was that I had simply become too old for pyramids, and I’d have to accept that. Then I thought about it. I had failed to follow a single piece of advice I would have given a friend in the same position.

I thought of Federer. He has credited luck and his attacking style of play for some of his longevity. But he also eased into his career, playing fewer tournaments than many of his competitors early on. In late 2014, I remembered Federer talking about how he felt bringing more consistency to his training — rather than ramping his training way down and then up just before tournaments — helped him temper back problems as he got older.

Even Serena Williams’s father backed off on competitions when she was 10 so that she (and her sister, Venus) would have a lighter load. As for Brady, he embraced variety early: He was drafted as a catcher out of high school by the Montreal Expos.

I started over, with an eye less toward pushing through every day and more toward a Federer model: Start slow and build to consistency, rest when my body says so … and ditch Serena’s pump-up jams until I worked up to more intensity.

I was pleasantly surprised — shocked, really, at how quickly I could do push-up pyramids again. The biggest challenge was refraining from jumping ahead in my progression after every good day. We pay a lot of lip service to the lessons that sport can teach: perseverance, teamwork, composure — and sometimes those actually manifest. The greatest lesson, though, might be unfurling right now, as a generation of athletes shows us that raging against the dying of the light takes little more than a dash of luck and a heap of consistency. And occasionally a few rule changes friendly to the offense.