Child prodigies, adolescents with a bright sporting future, athletes above average... Young stars dazzle the public, bring new life and enthusiasm to worn-out projects and serve as fuel for marketing. But all that glitters is not gold. A study indicates that these early players also have a significantly shorter life expectancy.
Dr Saul Newman and his team at Oxford University's Leverhulme Center for Population Science have focused specifically on elite baseball and basketball athletes whose athletic abilities peaked before the medium or decreased faster.
In an article published in the journal Science Advances, researchers reveal that gamers who peaked at a younger age had a 1.2-year shorter adult life expectancy. Those who were able to maintain their athletic performance longer, in contrast, had a 0.8-year higher life expectancy.
The work used data from 24,000 U.S. male baseball and basketball players spanning 150 years to calculate the age at which they reached the peak of their athletic abilities and the rates of decline in performance to predict patterns of mortality in baseball. old age.
Data on the athletes' height, body mass index (BMI), and performance metrics—such as the batting average of baseball players and the number of points scored by a basketball player per game—were used to Calculate the age at peak performance and the rate of decline for each athletic ability.
Newman included in his analysis the best baseball players of all time. Legends like catcher Yogi Berra (New York Yankees), Willie Mays (San Francisco Giants, perhaps the most complete player of all time) or pitcher Sugar Cain (Philadephia Athletics). Berra, for example, was named the best American player in 1951, 1954 and 1955, as well as becoming the player with the most World Series (10) in the history of this sport, to which must be added the three that he won as coach. .
The statistics collected by the experts at the University of Oxford had surprising and complex links with aging. Athletes who peaked at different ages, or whose abilities declined at different rates, also seemed to age at different rates.
Those who peaked later had death rates that doubled every 7.6 years of age. Athletes who peaked early had death rates that doubled every 8.4 years of age, and their odds of death increased more slowly with age, which could indicate slower rates of aging despite shorter lifespans. .
"Early life athletic performance can be used to predict mortality and aging in elite male athletes," Saul Newman said in a statement. An unexpected finding was the association between height and old-age mortality rates in baseball and basketball players, meaning taller athletes were more likely to die earlier.
Players who peaked at a younger age and maintained their athletic performance for a shorter period than their peers had a significantly shorter life expectancy than those who peaked later and maintained their athletic performance longer .
Furthermore, the study found that athletes whose athletic abilities declined at different rates also had vastly different death rates. This displayed gap in mortality rates persisted for at least 40 years after retirement.
The data shows, for example, how the batting averages of Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, and Sugar Cain peaked at different ages and then declined with age. This and other study findings suggest that athletes have a single peak in overall performance rather than having different peaks at different ages.
The researchers captured batting average spikes and rates of decline in athletic performance. Yogi Berra and Willie Mays have the same rate of decline in batting average, two percent of maximum capacity per year, while Sugar Cain's batting average declines by 12% per year. Cain passed away at 67 and Berra at 90, while Mays is still alive at 92.
“We know that reaction times, motor functions, and aerobic and anaerobic performance decrease with the onset of aging. However, little is known about the effect of physiological decline in early life on mortality,” says Dr. Newman.
Nearly half the baseball sample size predates 1947, when nonwhite players were barred from the major leagues, allowing experts to explore whether ethnicity and racism shortened baseball careers and life expectancy. players.
"While racism likely plays a role in shortening careers and lives, the effects observed in the study cannot be explained by this discrimination alone: considerable effects were observed in both segregated and non-segregated leagues," they conclude. .
