I’m guessing most people who compete at the world class level in a sport take it up in their teens or even earlier but do we have examples of people who came to a sport later in life and still managed to become the best at it?
I’m guessing there might be a couple of examples of people who are competitive in Professional Sport X and switch later to Professional Sport Y which is quite similar and they excel so I guess the best metric is from when they started seriously competing as a professional athlete of any kind.
If you consider coaching, Pat Burns was a police officer for a number of years before becoming a coach at age 32. He eventually made it to the NHL, was named coach of the year three times and won a Stanley Cup. He died of colon cancer at age 58 in 2010 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2014. Actually he should have been elected when he was still alive, although terminally ill, but the HOF selection committee screwed up the voting (according to a book by Al Strachan).
I didn’t start drinking heavily until I was 18 or so, and, up until about a decade ago, I was pretty well a world champion at it.
In the 70’s, Yvon Lambert, number 11 with the Habs, (and always wore that annoying black turtle neck sweater under his jersey), didn’t start playing minor hockey until he was 15.
I’m not sure if this counts but the oldest NFL player to be drafted (at age 29 in 1977) also holds the record for the longest field goal in organized American Football at 69 yards, and hasn’t been beaten yet at the professional, college, or high school level.
In the late '60s and '70s, it was very common for NFL kickers to be soccer players (primarily from Europe) who came over to the U.S. having not previously played football, and many of them were already in their mid 20s when they started playing. For example, Toni Fritsch had been a successful soccer player in Austria for a number of years before being signed by the Cowboys in 1971, at age 25 or 26, having never played American football.
Johannson had the distinction of being both (a) a little older than many of them when he started playing football, (b) playing college football first (many European kickers went straight to pro ball), and (c) actually being drafted.
Also, in that era, college kickers in many conferences were allowed to kick field goals off of a tee (essentially, a rubber block, 1" or 2" high), and were allowed to use balls that they had “loosened up” by kicking in practice. Not to entirely discount Johannson’s kick, which was huge, regardless, but rules changes in the years since then have gotten rid of the tee, and prevented kickers from being able to prep balls, making it much less likely that someone will be able to break his record.
Fourteen years old isn’t extremely late in life to take up a sport, but may be the latest a ‘possibly best ever at their position’ basketballer took it up. Tim Duncan
This sounds like a very good candidate! I figured such examples would have been more common in the past, given how immensely more mature and competitive most sports have become over time.
I consider bobsledding a possible source of modern day examples. It has the distinction of being a team sport (teammates can compensate for a lesser athlete) and having a low demand for specialized skills (running on ice and properly jumping into the narrow sled will be the only things a physically fit push athlete will find unfamiliar), as well as having a high-tech element that allows athletes to overcome their lack of physical and technical prowess to some extent. Thus it is not that uncommon for newcomers to take up the sport in their twenties, in rare cases - even later. For example, Giuseppe Gibilisco is a former pole vaulter who joined the Italian national bobsleigh team at the age of 37 (admittedly, that particular team is not among the top contenders).
Rebecca Romero is an Olympic silver-winning and World Championship winning rower, for GB, retiring in 2006 at the age of 26.
She then took up track cycling, winning a silver that very same year in her track debut (UCI Track World Cup event in Moscow). She won Gold in Beijing in 2008. Just two years from starting the sport.
She now competes, I believe, in Ironman events. Of course she does.
Another advantage to bobsledding is that, because of the specialized equipment, it’s very difficult to do it casually. A single-digit-age kid can easily own their own baseball or football or soccer ball and play with it, but nobody’s going to be bobsledding until they’re old enough to be on some sort of formal team, which will probably not even be at the academic level.
And since running has already been mentioned, I seem to recall something about some ultramarathon champion who competed as a whim when he was in his 60s. Ah, yes, here we go. He had, of course, run for all of his life (mostly chasing sheep), but it looks like his first competitive running was when he was 60. The next year, he ran in a race from Sydney to Melbourne, beating the previous record by 2 days and the second-place finisher by 10 hours.
Bernard Hopkins did not start boxing until his twenties.
As did Ken Norton and Rocky Marciano.
The Olympic Gold Medal winning Field Hockey player Dhyan Chand did not start playing Hockey until he was in the Army.
A couple of other well-known examples of athletes moving into bobsledding (though not as old as Gibilisco was):
NFL running back Herschel Walker started bobsledding sometime in his 20s, and was on the US Olympic Team in '92, at age 29 (finishing 7th in the two-man). He was still an active NFL player at that point, as well.
Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones took up bobsledding in her late 20s (after competing as a hurdler at the 2008 Olympics), and joined the US bobsled team in 2012, at age 30. She won a world championship in bobsled in 2013, then finished 11th in the 2014 Olympics. She still competed as a hurdler throughout her time as a bobsledder.
He also started doing MMA for the first time professionally at age 49 and has a 2-0 record (both wins by KO).
I’m not convinced he’s human.
Also, he’s a good cook and I watched him win the Celebrity Cook-Off on Food Network in 2014, beating Penn Gillette in the final. With Vanilla Ice as his sous chef no less.
Definitely agreed. In 2011, at age 49, he said that he was considering returning to the NFL. It didn’t happen (I have no idea if any team seriously considered signing him), but he’s a physical freak, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could have still played.
Ron Lefore didn’t take up baseball until he was about 23, after he had been sent to prison for armed robbery. He made his MLB debut at age 26, and had a successful career, Including being named to an All-star team?