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When 40-year-old Luka Modrić lined up for Croatia against England on Wednesday evening, he embodied a growing trend in elite sport. A generation ago, a footballer competing at the highest level at 40 would have been a rarity, but the 2026 World Cup features a record eight players aged at least 40 – more than all previous tournaments combined.

It’s not just football. Lewis Hamilton is still competing in Formula One aged 41, while earlier this week Wimbledon granted Serena Williams, 44, and Venus Williams, 46, a wildcard into the women’s doubles draw.

Across sport, careers that once seemed impossibly long are becoming increasingly common.

But are athletes really getting better with age, or have they just become better at managing the ageing process?

According to a report by the Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, elite athletes really are getting older.

Since 1992, the average age of Olympians has increased by about two years, from 25 to 27. In football, the average age of top male players increased from 26 in 1990 to 27 in 2018, while for female players it increased from 23 to 26 over the same period.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean athletes are peaking later. Instead, it could simply be that they are remaining competitive for longer.

“Athletes don’t stop ageing,” said Dr Liam Anderson, an exercise physiologist at the University of Birmingham. “What sports science has done is help them slow the rate of decline and maximise what they have left. When that is combined with decades of experience and tactical understanding, we’re increasingly seeing athletes remain competitive much later into their careers.”

Some sports, and some positions within sports, are more resistant to ageing than others. In football, goalkeepers tend to have the longest careers, followed by defenders and midfielders, while forwards often show the earliest decline.

Ageing affects almost every physiological system, but it doesn’t affect them equally.

“One of the fitness qualities that most deteriorates is our explosiveness, so the ability of a muscle to produce force quickly,” said Dr Paul Hough, a sport and exercise scientist at the University of Westminster.

“When we look at a pure speed sport such as 100 or 200 metres, you won’t see many veteran sprinters competing into their mid- to late thirties, or if you’re a footballer who relies on your speed, then you probably have to either modify the way you play the game or end up retiring sooner.”

Maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂ max), heart rate and cardiac output also gradually fall, along with flexibility, while recovery becomes slower and injuries take longer to heal.

At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the average age of short-distance runners was about 25. For swimmers, who are also heavily reliant on speed, oxygen consumption and flexibility, the average age was between 22 and 23.

Muscle endurance, which relies more heavily on fatigue-resistant slow-twitch muscle fibres, tends to decline more slowly. In Tokyo, marathon runners were among the oldest athletes: the average age was 30 for men and 31 for women, while the oldest competitors were 44 in both races.

Athletic performance is not solely determined by physiology. “Experience, tactical awareness, anticipation, decision-making and emotional control often continue to improve with age,” said Anderson. “In many sports, these qualities can partially compensate for small physical declines.”

In highly technical, low-impact sports, such as sailing, shooting and equestrianism, age can be a virtue. During the Tokyo Olympics, the average age for equestrians was 39 for men and 36 for women.

Successful athletes often adapt as they age. Take Cristiano Ronaldo. “He started out as a winger and used to heavily rely on his speed and explosiveness, but he’s gradually adapted his game, so he’s more just an out-and-out forward now and not having to make those sprints all the time, because he’s reading the game better,” said Hough.

Serena Williams is another example. She has recently returned to play doubles tennis, which is more tactical and relies less on physical prowess.

The increased professionalisation of sport may also have played a role in extending players’ careers. Modern athletes train, recover, eat and sleep with a level of discipline that would have been unusual even a few decades ago. Financial incentives have also changed dramatically. Remaining competitive for an extra two or three years can now be worth millions of pounds.

Dr Alex Ireland at Manchester Metropolitan University argues that athletes are benefiting from improvements across almost every aspect of their environment, from playing surfaces to clothing and equipment.

“If you think about [football] pitches in the 70s and 80s, even the 90s, at Premier League clubs like Manchester United and Arsenal, they were quite poor,” he said. “Now, I go and watch Altrincham occasionally, which is a fifth division side, and it’s like a carpet.”

Better surfaces are less energy-sapping and may reduce the risk of injury. The same is true of advances in boots, balls and other equipment. “Everything around games and sports has improved,” Ireland said.

Growing understanding of injury prevention has also helped. Prof Joseph Baker at the University of Toronto points to improved awareness of concussion and overuse injuries, alongside rule changes in sports such as American football and ice hockey that are designed to reduce players’ exposure to certain types of harm.

If athletes do get injured, sports medicine and rehabilitation have advanced dramatically.

“Things like a cruciate ligament injury would have probably been career-ending, even maybe 25 to 30 years ago,” said Ireland. “Now it’s probably a six- to nine-month injury, and lots of players have come back and had excellent careers after that.”

Advances in sports science have transformed how athletes train, particularly when it comes to managing recovery.

“Recovery is really important because you can maximise adaptation and allow more sustained high-intensity training,” said Dr Tom Brownlee, a sports scientist at the University of Birmingham, who has previously worked with Liverpool FC.

“If you’re not fully recovered then you can’t go again so hard with training the following day.”

A major change has been the ability to monitor training loads in unprecedented detail. Using GPS trackers, sports scientists can measure not just how far a player has run, but how many sprints, accelerations and decelerations they have performed. “It means that if an older athlete has performed a lot of explosive actions, they can identify when it might be better to back off for training, or train more,” said Hough.

Elite athletes also routinely use tools such as ice baths, saunas, compression garments and blood monitoring to try to optimise recovery. Brownlee describes these as marginal gains – small improvements that become worthwhile once the fundamentals of sleep, nutrition, training and recovery have already been mastered.

Yet no single breakthrough appears to explain the increasing longevity of elite athletes. Anderson argues that it is “the accumulation of many small improvements” that has made the difference. “Better recovery strategies, more sophisticated training load management, advances in rehabilitation, improved nutrition and greater understanding of sleep have all helped athletes maintain performance for longer.”

Even these factors are unlikely to tell the whole story. As Baker points out, athletes such as Ronaldo and the Williams sisters are not typical competitors. “They are among the very best to ever play the game,” he said. “That makes the explanation for these age effects hard to decipher.”

Genetics almost certainly play a role, as does access to resources and support that are unavailable to most athletes. Financial incentives may matter too: star performers are enormously valuable to teams, sponsors and promoters, creating strong incentives to prolong their careers wherever possible.

Luck also plays its part. Some athletes remain competitive into their 40s simply because they’ve avoided the serious injuries that derailed the careers of equally talented rivals.

So, what does the increased longevity of these sporting idols mean for the rest of us? While elite athletes may use blood monitoring, ice baths and other gadgets to squeeze the last bit of juice out of the lemon, they have usually already mastered the basics. “For us average Joes, we don’t necessarily need to be placing our focus there because very few of us have got our sleep, nutrition, training and our rest dialled, and that’s where we should be focused,” Brownlee said.

Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, consuming enough protein to support tissue repair, and getting adequate sleep – when much of the body’s recovery and adaptation takes place – may not sound revolutionary, but these are the foundations upon which performance is built.

It is also important to acknowledge that bodies age, whoever you are, and to adapt your training accordingly.

“A common issue I see is that people try to replicate the training they did when they were in their 20s, the same intensity and volume, but the body is not able to recover as quickly as it used to, which means your next training sessions are affected,” said Hough. “Bearing that in mind, training more frequently but less intensively, or with less volume, may be a solution.”

That does not mean shying away from exercise. Ireland said he regularly sees competitors in their 70s, 80s and 90s at masters athletics events – competitions for older athletes. Some took up training only later in life.

“It’s never too late to start, but you just have to be careful and progressive about it,” he said. “Your body will adapt, your muscles and bones will get stronger, it will just take longer, and you have to be a little bit cautious and not do too much, or too high in intensity.”

Dr Lorcan Daly, a physiologist at the Technological University of the Shannon in Ireland, agrees. Although age-related declines in physical performance are ultimately inevitable, he argues that many of the changes commonly attributed to ageing are actually linked to inactivity. “What is often being reversed [through exercise] is not ageing itself, but the consequences of physical inactivity,” Daly said.

He points to the example of the French cyclist Robert Marchand, who improved both his aerobic fitness and his one-hour cycling record between the ages of 101 and 103. The feat did not reverse ageing, Daly said, but it demonstrated how responsive the human body can remain, even in extreme old age.

Mindset may matter as much as physiology. When Baker interviewed older masters athletes about how they maintained their performance, he found that they did not deny or resist ageing. Instead, they accepted that some decline was inevitable while remaining committed to training and competition.

“The most interesting thing for me was the realisation that while they understand that their performance will go down as they get older, they were empowered to try to prevent this as much as they could through continued involvement in training and competition,” he said. “This engagement in hard work and challenging activities is a much better predictor of performance maintenance than age is.”