How greying athletes at the Olympics may have defied ageing

In Paris, the oldest competitors showed up for shooting, table tennis and equestrian events. And there were middle-agers in golf, beach volleyball, cycling, sailing, rowing and fencing, not to mention skateboarding, where 51-year-old Andy Macdonald and 49-year-old Dallas Oberholzer held us spellbound. They all notched clear victories over ageist stereotypes—and maybe even time itself.

Russell Hepple, a professor at the University of Florida, told me he is studying people who’ve persisted in sports even into their 80s and 90s, hoping to get how they do it. 

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There’s more funding for studies of centenarians, he said, but he thinks there’s more potential benefit in studying subjects with athletic longevity—like Ed Whitlock, who in his 70s ran multiple marathons in under three hours; the people who compete in the Boston Marathon’s 80+ category; or the woman who could still sprint, long-jump and hurl the shot put into her 90s. What he’s interested in is not just extending life, but extending the healthy, highly functional part of life.

Hepple’s lead collaborator is his wife Tanja Taivassalo, an associate research professor. He said the project was inspired by her extraordinary father, who has twice won the 80+ Boston Marathon. So far, they’ve collected just a small group of subjects—15 people who are still competitive after age 75. 

But all of them are at the world championship level in their age groups. Some of his subjects died in their 80s and 90s, but continued to compete until the last weeks or even days of their lives.

In one of their studies, they found that super-agers had an abundance of hundreds of different proteins compared to others. Some of these proteins were already associated with athletic performance, but the role others might play isn’t yet known. 

Eventually, they want to tease out which differences are caused by long-term strenuous workouts and which are genetic gifts that might be possible to copy with drugs.

Consider mitochondria—the body’s tiny power plants. They have their own DNA and a sort of life of their own—thousands of them live and die inside our cells. Scientists think animals acquired mitochondria from tiny bacteria that invaded early cells and developed a symbiotic relationship with us. 

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In recent studies, he said, scientists have found that as people age, they lose the ability to clean up a metabolic byproduct called kynurenine—associated with physical and cognitive decline. It’s the mitochondria that normally do this critical job.

When the mitochondria are abundant and in working order, people not only have their maximum strength, they also have their most precise control between muscles and the brain, said Luigi Ferrucci, a researcher at the National Institute on Aging. “Master athletes are people who maintain harmonic integrity in multiple systems in the body," he said.

As you age, the number of mitochondria in your cells declines, but that happens more slowly in people who continue to do strenuous exercise. They’re able to activate ‘mitochondrial biogenesis.’ In this process, old mitochondria die and get cleared for new ones. 

As we get older, the sentinels that normally flag malfunctioning mitochondria grow lax, causing us to lose both the quality and quantity of our microscopic power plants. The immune system also starts to malfunction more as we get old. 

If you’re over a certain age and sedentary, he said, and you suddenly decide you’re going to run for miles, your body will produce a flood of inflammatory cytokines—immune molecules that will make you feel sore the next day. But if you run a little on most days, your baseline level of inflammatory cytokines will drop, along with your risk of chronic disease.

In the future, researchers may find personalized drugs that can keep our mitochondria refreshing themselves and keep inflammation in check. In the meantime, there are too many empty promises.

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Garry Palmer, who runs a sports performance centre, said the people who succeed in staying in the game for decades find it enjoyable; the idea of “no pain, no gain" should be junked, replaced with listening to your body and knowing when to take a break. Ageing isn’t a steady downhill slide. Instead, it offers plenty of opportunities for improvement and growth.

Better training and equipment is already allowing Olympians to compete for longer. As scientists learn more, what looks like extreme staying power now might one day start to appear ordinary. ©bloomberg