A Lesson in False Limits
Few professionals suffer more from ageism than athletes. Heaven forfend an NFL star or an Olympian become 40ish on the field of play. That’s known as “staying too long” and “tainting their legacy.” Fans and commentators seem to want athletes to retire before they lose the luster of their prime and start looking knee sore—an expectation that, judging by the recent exploits of the skier Lindsey Vonn and the quarterback Philip Rivers, has cheated audiences out of who knows how many gladdening third acts.
What a corrective to such nonsense Vonn is. Last Friday, at the age of 41 and on a partially replaced right knee, she sprayed the snow of St. Moritz at 70 miles an hour in the downhill event to become the oldest skier, woman or man, ever to win a World Cup race. Her last World Cup victory had come seven years earlier—or, as she said wryly after her win, “just a couple of days.”
The shock of Vonn’s resurgence had not yet worn off when, two days later, the 44-year-old Rivers jogged—gingerly—onto the field as an emergency starter for the injury-thinned Indianapolis Colts. He is literally a grandpa, has an easy-chair double chin, and hadn’t thrown a pro pass since his retirement, in 2021. The Colts’ opponents, the Seattle Seahawks, were rated as 14-point favorites. A hand-lettered sign held up by a Seahawks fan read For Every Rivers Sack—AARP Gets a Donation.
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Yet Rivers threw a touchdown pass, which he celebrated with a double pump of his fist and an air kick, and led his team to a near-victory. (They lost just 18–16 in the final seconds.) It appears he will remain the Colts’ starter for the final three games of the season as the team seeks a playoff spot, a chase that Rivers is down for. He’d clearly missed playing—he told reporters after Sunday’s game: “My wife always tells me I’m crazy because there’s been times in the last three or four years I said, ‘I wish I could just throw one and get hit—hard.’”
Too many athletes, however, are discouraged from competing as they age. When Vonn announced a year ago that she was returning to racing, the former Olympic champion Michaela Dorfmeister blurted on TV that she thought Vonn “should see a psychologist” and asked, “Does she want to kill herself?” Another Olympic gold medalist, Bernhard Russi, called Vonn’s comeback a “no go,” and said that her “high-risk style” was “too risky.” The Swiss skier Sonja Nef said, “At 40, you can’t go full throttle like that, and certainly not with an artificial knee joint,” adding, “It feels like she’s jeopardizing her legacy.” Nef also said, “I would guess Lindsey doesn’t cope in normal life, where she isn’t the center of attention.” The Swiss legend Pirmin Zurbriggen also suggested that Vonn was skiing out of neediness, because she “hasn’t recognized the meaning and purpose of her other life in recent years.”
But what if her purpose is to ski? Yes, Vonn took a risk by returning to racing. Even the most superb body begins to diminish in a person’s early 30s, thanks to the onset of sarcopenia, which sounds like a canker but means the incremental decline of muscle mass. Also, imperceptibly at first, aerobic capacity begins to lessen, flexibility decreases, ligaments stiffen. But downhilling is dangerous at any age. And premature retirement is not good for many people: Studies show that retirees who lack purpose have a higher association with mortality, as well as higher incidences of sleep disturbance and depression. Yet Vonn’s peers insisted she was supposed to do the dignified thing and stay away to avoid injury or embarrassment. That’s their vanity, not hers. “Did they all become doctors and I missed it,” Vonn shot back on her X account. “Because they talk like they know more than the best doctors in the world.”
Rivers certainly looked old early in the game against the Seahawks, when he awkwardly slipped, fell to the ground, and struggled back to his feet. “He got up on his own, that’s a sign of youthful energy,” the CBS commentator Jason McCourty joked. But as Rivers went on to prove, high performance is not all about muscle and aerobics. Know-how doesn’t fade as quickly. Tom Brady in 2022 set the record as the oldest quarterback to start in the NFL, at the age of 45, in part because he knew exactly where to go to avoid getting hit. So does Rivers, one of the canniest readers of the field.
Rivers retired in 2021 not because he couldn’t play anymore but because he wouldn’t. He and his wife, Tiffany, have 10 children, and after 17 years in the league, he felt ambivalent and wondered if he’d focused on himself for long enough. The decision to retire, he said at his reintroductory press conference, “was right, and I’m still at peace with when it happened. But I also left knowing that I had some left in the tank.” He added, “So I didn’t walk away because I felt like I was done.”
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Vonn, too, left her sport believing she hadn’t exhausted herself. She quit in 2019 because knee injuries wouldn’t let her train without pain. Her partial right-knee replacement last year, using less-invasive robotic arthroscopy and titanium components, gave her the urge to try again. In St. Moritz she pistoned through her turns and hurtled across the finish line with such conviction that she skidded into the safety barrier and toppled over. “I had a hard time stopping,” she said. She was nearly a second faster than her closest competitor—a huge margin. She “took us all to school,” Sofia Goggia, a 2018 Olympic gold medalist, said, “and left us with a pacifier in our mouths.”
Vonn and Rivers unretired in different circumstances, but they both saw an opening to compete again, and something adventurous in them said, Why not? They were guided not by a desire for the perfection of their prime, but instead by an exploratory curiosity. “The easiest way to eliminate all the things that might could go bad is to stay home,” Rivers said. “And the only way to find out Can you still do it? is to go try.”
These athletes will have to retire again, of course. They can’t extend their careers by decades, only by years. As LeBron James, 40, tweeted after Vonn’s victory, “40+ is the new 20. Well, until you wake up the next day!” But in the meantime, what a lesson in false limits.