I noted in the Olympics thread that Canadian swimmer Summer McIntosh won the gold in the 400 metre medley by a ludicrous margin. She is considered a prohibitive favorite to win another medal or two. McIntosh isn’t even 18 years old yet, not fir another few weeks. This isn’t her first crack at the Olympics either; she competed in Tokyo when she was only 14. She won world championships at the ages of 16 and 17.
This strikes me as being astounding. A teenager hasn’t had much time to learn, to be coached, to have their natural talents fully developed. Hell, McIntosh was winning championships at age 15, when she wasn’t even fully grown.
I am a baseball fan; it is well understood that baseball players peak, on average, at age 27. Not all of them do, some are earlier or later, but there’s a pretty high bell curve centred at 27. Very few baseball players ever make it to the big leagues as teenagers and it’s never their peak. No one has ever been the best in the world at baseball at age 15-17 and no one ever will be.
What is the sport (please limit this to contests of physical skill, not brain games) that has the HIGHEST peak age? What’s the lowest? Is it swimming?
Lowest is likely female gymnastics, with 18 being long considered the end of a gymnast’s career, and autocratic countries lying about ages to get underaged gymnasts into competitions. Though I’ve heard that that’s changing now, with a greater emphasis on high-strength moves.
Horse racing might also be a contender, due to low weight being so essential for a jockey, but I’m not sure about that.
Alternately, you could say that horse racing is the definite winner, since the athletes generally peak at 2 years old.
Swimming is a good candidate, and so is Gymnastics. You can win at both without necessarily adjusting to or assessing your competitors which is largely what “experience” is valuable for.
I have no idea what the high end is but I suspect it is a sport that requires a lot of strategy that can only be learned and internalized over a long career. Maybe a sport like fencing?
I don’t know much about golf, but I would assume it’s the oldest of the major sports. Maybe bowling or darts is higher.
Football (gridiron) would have very different answers depending on position – a running back probably peaks on average at 24-25, while a quarterback might not peak until 30 or even 33. Kickers may not peak until even later.
I know people who are very old who still participate professionally at a very old age in bowling (my father-in-law is one). He and his friends also regularly golf (though not professionally).
This guy was competing in the PBA (top pro bowling league in the US) Tournament of Champions at age 87.
Granted, in that particular contest he placed 59 out of 62, so he wasn’t the best. But he also wasn’t the worst.
I don’t know nearly as much about golf as I do about bowling, but Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship less than a month away from his 51st birthday in 2021.
For QBs it might be as late as the late 30s, barring an injury plagued career. Tom Brady is the obvious example, but among recent players there’s also Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and Aaron Rodgers. Back in the day there were guys like Steve Young, Warren Moon, and Brett Favre who also had late peaks. Left tackle also seems to a position where the peak is closer to mid 30s, with guys like Andrew Whitworth, Anthony Munoz, Jonathan Ogden, and Joe Thomas as good examples.
Those are all great QBs who played at a high level into their late 30s or more, but I don’t think they peaked in their late 30s. I think you could find the best season for each of those QBs was around 30-33 years old. Maybe 35 for a few of them.
Golf, for men, is close to 30; some preliminary studies I’ve done on only majors shows that pretty conclusively, but that it has also fallen in this millenium a bit, down closer to 29, with the win rate dropping off pretty strongly after age 35, occasional wins by guys over 40 like Lefty, Jack, or Tiger nonwithstanding (note the oldest major winners tend to be all-time greats, capable of hanging onto their skills longer because their peaks were so high to begin with).
That’s for the men. For the women I found that it was around 24, with an even steeper dropoff after age 30 than the one for men post-35. My guess is that many want to have kids at/after 30, but that doesn’t seem to explain the entire difference, as there have been several teen winners of majors on the LPGA Tour in this millenium, but only Jordan Spieth has won majors before age 22 on the PGA Tour.
Tennis 20 years ago would have been an answer for one which favored the young crowd (again lower average for the women)-until the Big Three came along and kept winning majors up close to age 40 (Serena too we can’t forget). They likely will prove to be an anomaly, same thing as the top golfers, can hang onto their skills longer.
Note Katie Ledecky won her 8th gold in swimming today at age 27, but yes she is an outlier.
Formula 1 typically has lower retirement ages than Indycar, endurance racing, and NASCAR (old guys have run quite a few races in the latter but haven’t won much), which is likely due to all those rapidly changing g forces on the road courses they run exclusively, where Indy gives drivers on ovals a bit of a break half the time (g’s are stronger on ovals but don’t vary like they do on a road course).
Rules changed in 1997 to make the minimum age 16. Simone Biles is currently considered the greatest female gymnast in history, and just won gold at age 27 - so yeah, that’s changing now.
Adam Vinaiteri is often used as an example of a player who was able to play very well until his later years in the NFL. He played a total of 24 seasons as a kicker and played in 365, the second-most games played by any NFL player in history. (The most was Morten Andersen, another kicker who played in 382.)
Vinaiteri’s best year arguably was 2004, when he scored more points than anyone else in the NFL (at 141), made 31 of 33 field goals, and was a perfect 48 of 48 in extra points. He was 32.
HOWEVER, in 2013 he scored 139 points and was 35/40 in field goals and again perfect in extra points (34/34). And the next year, in 2014, he scored 140 points making 30/31 in field goals and a perfect 50/50 in extra points. To me, 2014 was his best year because despite scoring one less point than he did a decade earlier, he was more accurate (he only missed one kick period between his field goals and extra point attempts). And to bolster my claim that he peaked that year, he was also included on the AP’s list of top 100 players (sneaking in at #98) which made him the first specialist (kicker/punter) player to ever make that list (and the oldest player to make it, at least at that point).
So going by that, the man peaked at age 42. That’s astounding. And he continued to play for 5 more years in the NFL. I think it’s fair to say that kickers in the NFL can peak quite late in their careers.
For sufficiently-long values of “long distance”. Cliff Young famously won the first Sydney-to-Melbourne ultramarathon, at age 61. He later set another world record at age 79.
Football is surprising sport to find players peaking in their forties, but there you go.
If you don’t feel kickers really qualify, let’s try George Blanda, a quarterback (and kicker). He played 26 seasons over 4 separate decades and held the record for number of games payed and consecutive games played when he retired.
In 1970, as back-up quarterback and kicker at age 43, he salvaged games for the Oakland Raiders throughout the season. In the AFC Championship game, he came off the bench to throw two touchdowns. a field goal, and two extra points in a losing effort. He was the NFL Player of the Year (Bert Bell Award) and AP Male Athlete of the year.
He retired at 48. His last game was the AFC Championship game in which, as a kicker, he scored 40% of the Raiders points in a losing effort.
She’s definitely an outlier, but I just want to take this opportunity to say how proud we are in Luxembourg that we had the oldest athlete at this year’s Olympics.
Better sports medicine and training has made it possible to be productive as a player, for longer, compared to decades ago. In the '90s, for example, age 38 had been demonstrated to be the point at which elite quarterbacks nearly always saw a sharp dropoff in performance. In more recent years, we’ve seen a number of elite QBs (Brady, Rodgers, Brees, Favre, etc.) play very well into their late 30s and 40s.
Though he had an amazing run in 1970, and did continue to play until the unheard-of age of 48, Blanda’s real peak (which is what the OP asks about) was from age 33 to 36, when he was quarterbacking (and kicking) for the Houston Oilers, in the first four years of the AFL (1960-63). During that four-season span, he won two AFL championships, was All-Pro three times, and was the Player of the Year in 1961.
As a horseplayer, I’m going to disagree with this claim, but only by a year. Thoroughbred racehorses generally peak at 3 years old; and accordingly, the major stakes races are for three-year-olds: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont, the King’s Plate, and the list goes on.
In fact, a lot of horseplayers don’t bet on two-year-old races, because (a), they’re generally inexperienced maidens (horses who have never won), and thus there is very little information to go on in order to make informed selections; and (b), because they usually need more training, are still developing, and are basically unpredictable.
But if we regard age 3 as the peak for a thoroughbred racehorse, then you have a good point.
