The Longevity Secrets Helping Athletes Blow Past the Limits of Age
NY Times.
Good read. Discusses some interesting tech.
With cutting-edge sports medicine and sci-fi gadgetry, more and more athletes are figuring out how to extend their careers.
Devin Gordon spoke with more than two dozen pro athletes, coaches, team executives, trainers, agents, surgeons and wellness entrepreneurs for this article.
It was just over three decades ago that the Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs did something remarkable, possibly unmatched in baseball history. For much of his career, Boggs’s routine for bouncing back after games — his preferred postgame recovery modality, in the parlance of modern sports science — was pounding cans of Miller Lite. And according to Boggs, during one flight from Boston to Los Angeles in 1994 (or possibly 1992 or 1989; the dates are understandably fuzzy) he drank 73 beers.
Boggs was in his mid-30s at the time and still reliably batting well over .300, which would be exceptional even for a pro player in his late-20s physical prime, but he was also playing in a different era. Suffice it to say that in modern baseball — a power game predicated on tape-measure home runs and 100-mile-per-hour fastballs — there’s no way Boggs would bat above .300 at an advanced age with 73-beer hangovers. Pro athletes now, especially older ones, are more like round-the-clock recovery droids who occasionally play sports. They’re not guzzling Miller Lites on those cross-country flights; they’re drinking cherry juice for the melatonin to get ahead of the jet lag and wearing Normatec compression sleeves on both legs to stimulate lymphatic drainage and reduce inflammation.
Sports history is dotted with Darwinian anomalies like Tom Brady, winning a playoff game at 44, or Nolan Ryan, firing a no-hitter at 44, or Dara Torres, swimming to an Olympic silver medal at 41. But their rarity was part of what made them so compelling. What’s so compelling now is the sheer number of still golden oldies. This February, at the Winter Olympics, two athletes over 40 won gold medals. A few months before that, Lindsey Vonn, 41, won — dominated — a World Cup ski race six years after retiring from the sport because of chronic knee pain. Last season, three 40-plus quarterbacks — Aaron Rodgers, 41, Joe Flacco, 41, and Philip Rivers, 44 — started N.F.L. games. Nick Folk is coming off the three most accurate field-goal-kicking seasons of his 18-year career at age 41 — about a decade and a half older than the average N.F.L. player. Just days before pitcher Justin Verlander turned 43 in February, he signed a one-year, $13 million deal with the Detroit Tigers, the team that drafted him in 2004. LeBron James, 41, played 206 minutes this season alongside his son Bronny, 21.
All pro athletes eventually reckon with their sports mortality and shift into career-extension mode, but that shift is happening earlier than ever. So many players have succeeded in blowing past the old biological limits that the maniacal pursuit of self-optimization has become routine for athletes of all ages. New technologies and techniques have revolutionized sports medicine, from surgical intervention to nutrition to mental health, even as some of these strategies feel more sci-fi than scientific.
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Discussed in the article:
Nice to see trader acceptance of PEMF.