sadistics. i do not think that word means what you think it means.

One thought: I think there’s more at work here than just physical breakdown. Look at Lance. He just got sick of having no life. One of my favorite Lance quotes is (and I paraphrase): “You guys just don’t understand. I can’t split and stack firewood in my backyard when I’m at home because of the fear that I’ll develop muscles in my arms and that weight will hold me back on the big climbs…”

I wonder how much the all-consuming nature of cycling also limits cyclists’ careers. They simply get tired of the grind. I can’t imagine riding 24/7 for a decade, especially not if I wasn’t one of the top twenty and getting ego reinforcements in the form of a high salary and public love and adoration (which I get none of now, by the way, unless I include Drew, and he’s kind of fickle).

In other words, maybe cyclists are just as good physically in their early thirties, but they’re just anxious to cash out and get on to a career that allows them to live with their families, flex their mental muscles a bit more and drink a couple beers now and then.

Just a thought.

Wallace Shawn rocks.

Ursula, this is a great post. And not just because of the great pics and my sudden urge to throw in a particular movie. I hope this gets good discussion and even more follow up as this stuff I can read for days.

I mean… holy shit.

It’s been a bit of a truism in sports that training & c. have increased longevity, so it’s so excellent to see someone hammer it out with numbers. one caveat: with the grand tours, the age is skewed by a poor sample size, and the fact that six of those post-millenium wins are by an aging Armstrong. Not a criticism of him, of course; just saying, on e dominant guy who happens to be old in cycling terms can mess with the numbers a bit.

Also, my money’s on fitness rather than team tactics. I do think most teams would dump their leader if they saw cracks in the facade, and had a kid waiting in the wings. Look at Contador in the 2007 Tour.

Anyway, this is excellent and I hope people recommend it up. And I hope you don’t mind me erasing that creative white space at the end.

 . . . is the huge advancements in sports physiology research, as well as application, that has taken place in the last 25 years which has consistently changed the peak age of an athlete to be slightly older in most all sports, but most notably in sports where aerobic endurance plays a key factor in the outcome of the event. You partially support this with your breakdown of average winning age by decade from 1970 through 2008, and I would speculate with significant confidence there would be correlating statistical evidence in other endurance related sports.

This is in no way related to the used of drugs in order to boost an athletes capability, but rather the specific use of specialized training, recovery, diet, supplements, rest, muscle stim., ect. in a manner to optimized the athlete towards a prearranged time of optimal performance.

There are many government and private organizations through out the world that are completely focused on this.
Three of the most notable are –
The UC Davis Department of Sports Medicine
The Australian Institute of Sport
The Mapei Sports Center

Despite this oversight, the article was really great and I very much appreciate you taking the time in breaking down this data.
It was very informative.

    Not only informative but makes me think (imagine that!). I am wondering now about how much money has affected the average age. Would it have been possible for a rider to target the Tour fifty years ago and pass up giving other races his full attention or even just using them as conditioning. And would have been possible to support a family on a successful racers salary fifty years ago. More money also pays the sports physiologist, personal coach, medical personnel, wind tunnel sessions etc..
    And oh yea, where’s that money coming from if not ultimately from the fans who are supporting the team sponsors and buying the bikes and other gear. And how can we afford these million Euro salaries?

That age seems to be less of an issue in endurance sports as distance/time increases. The ability to hold a high speed over a long distance decreases somewhat, but not endurance. As will athletes like Michellie Jones, she might not have the speed she once had as a short course athlete in her younger years, but she’s more experienced and uses that experience to put in max effort when it will do the most good. It seems to be the same for ultramarathoners, like Pam Reed from right here in Tucson. She won Badwater twice and she is well up there in age.

I’d argue that a lighter racing schedule for riders in recent years is probably as much or more responsible for riders’ longevity than access to better medicine. Merckx wasn’t spent at age 30 just because he didn’t have access to 21st century medicine, but because he’d raced himself into the ground every year for a decade.

I think this is basically the same point flying dog made above, talking about money. Thirty or forty years ago, riders raced a couple hundred days a year because they couldn’t make a living unless they raced that much. Now, a rider can make a decent living while racing fewer than half that many days.

Of course, even in the ‘60s and ’70s, a superstar like Eddy Merckx probably could have made a pretty good living while racing less than 200 days a year, and while using a large portion of his races as “training” for the big events, but that just wasn’t the way it was done back then, and, it seems, it just wasn’t the way Eddy Merckx was made. In the film The Greatest Show on Earth, about the 1974 Giro, one of Gimondi’s domestiques is interviewed. He says he had previously been a watercarrier for Merckx, but no one could do that job for more than two or three years without burning out. Merckx is always on the front of races, he says, so his teammates also always have to be on the front.

Bernard Hinault said during the Armstrong era that if Merckx had concentrated on the Tour de France they way Armstrong did, he would have won it twelve times. We’ll never know, but it sounds pretty believable to me.

Besides his terrible early-career Derny crash, Merckx took a terrible punch from a spectator in ‘75, followed by a nasty crash. Maybe it’s only post-facto that this is used to explain his low performance after that, and retirement.

I can imagine doing more analysis several ways, if someone were REALLY bored.

Number of days raced / chance of winning (call it cycling age, not calendar age)?

Select a group based on early-career wins, and see how many are lost to retirement at a particular age? (Easier to chart than injury). This might partially separate out those who retire while they are still winning, from those who go downhill for a while first.

The blip on the high end of the graph sort of suggest that the few who are lucky enough to avoid major injury and focused enough to not mind the eventual boredom (or desperate enough for the money) can keep going for a long time. Or are they all one person?

I thought I’d look at a race that isn’t a monument or Grand Tour, and see how it stacks up. I picked the Tour de Suisse because I thought it might be an interesting mix of stars warming up for the TdF and youngsters who were being tested out in a shorter stage race. How would that skew the results? I totted up the ages of the winners of the 72 editions of the race, and the average age came out to be…27.6. Almost exactly the same.

Decade by decade, it’s a little different:
Tour de Suisse/ GT/Monuments (from above)
00-08: 29.37 / 29.9
90-99: 27.64 / 29.4
80-89: 26.85 / 28.0
70-79: 27.52 / 27.4
60-69: 25.53 / 26.2
50-59 28.68 / 27.8
40-49 (6 editions): 28.64 / 27.4
33 (1st yr)-39: 27.02 / 25.8

In the ’80s and ’90s, for instance, winners of the Tour de Suisse averaged more than a full year younger than the GT/Monument guys, while the ’50s were totally skewed by 7 editions of the Tour de Suisse going to just two riders (Pasquale Fornara with 4 wins, Hugo Koblet with 3) who were necessarily older each time they won. And in the ’30s & ’40s, TdS winners averaged more than a year older than GT/M winners.

But you still do see the same average trend upward in the past 3 decades, at least. The big jump in age in the ’00s seems to show increasing interest in the TdS by mature TdF contenders: winners include Lance Armstrong, Alexandre Vinokourov (both 29.75), and Jan Ullrich (30.5 & 32.5).

Note: The age of each rider was figured by looking at month/year of birth and month TdS was held in rider’s winning year (didn’t settle permanently into June until 1955) and figuring the appropriate decimal—Vino, for instance, born in September 1973 was listed as 29.75 when he won in June 2003.

Once I went back and read that Ursula rounded by year (everyone born in the calendar year considered the same age regardless of month born), I ran the numbers again to get them to match. The average age using his method of figuring age comes out to 27.61, and the decades look like this:
00-08: 29.56
90-99: 27.7
80-89: 26.9
70-79: 27.5
60-69: 25.6
50-59: 28.5
40-49: 28.5
30-39: 27.0

So, in this case rounding doesn’t change too much except distribution of winners’ ages. Here are a few stats on that:

Oldest winner: 35.33
Youngest: 22.08
Winners who have reached their 30th birthday: 16 (22.22 percent)
Winners statistically age 30 or over (rounded up): 18 (25 percent)
Won over 30 without previously winning in 20s: 10 unrounded/12 rounded
Winners under the age of 25: 18 (25 percent) for those who haven’t reached their 25th birthday—goes down to 11 (15.3 percent) if ages are rounded up

Age distribution graphs

Unrounded (rider is listed as 29 even if will turn 30 one month after TdS—the way we usually consider age)

Rounded (Ursula’s method—rounding to year, giving a better idea of physiological age)

If I had my wish, this site would be at least 30 percent math.

These stats are just what we need to get really comprehensive.