THURSDAY, July 25, 2024 (HealthDay News) — The Olympics are often described as a rare, once-in-a-lifetime shot at international sports glory.

That may be more true for Olympic track and field competitors than other athletes, a new study reports.

There appears to be a peak performance age for track and field athletes, who specialize in running, jumping and throwing events, researchers report.

It turns out that the peak age for these athletes is 27.

After age 27, there’s only a 44% chance that an athlete’s peak is still ahead of them, results show. That number drops every subsequent year.

What’s more, the average age of Olympic track and field athlete has remained remarkably consistent over the past three decades — just under 27.

“Because the Olympics occur only once every four years, track and field athletes must carefully consider when and how they should train to maximize their probability of qualifying for the Olympics while at their personal peak,” said lead researcher David Awosoga, a master’s student in data science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

For the study, researchers analyzed year-by-year career performance data from every track and field athlete at the Olympics since the 1996 games in Atlanta. The team considered each athlete’s gender, nationality, event type and training level.

Researchers focused on track and field because for many of these athletes, the Olympics offers the best chance to display their prowess, Awosoga said.

“Unlike other Olympic sports such as soccer and tennis that have their own high-profile competitions outside of the Games, the Olympics is the largest stage upon which track-and-field athletes compete,” Awosoga said in a university news release.

However, age isn’t the only factor in an athlete’s peak, noted co-researcher Matthew Chow, an undergraduate economics student at the University of Waterloo.

Athletes tend to perform better, regardless of age, in years where they are competing for a place in an upcoming Olympics, researchers found.

For example, five-time Olympian Kim Collins of Saint Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies set a personal best in the 100-meter dash at age 40, researchers noted. Collins ran the dash in 9.93 seconds while competing for a spot at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“What’s really exciting is that we also found that knowing it’s an Olympic year actually helps predict an athlete’s performance,” Chow said.

Researchers hope their analysis can help athletes bring their best to the games.

“You can’t change the year of the Olympics, your genetics, or your nationality, but you might modify your training regimes to better align with these biological and external factors,” Awogosa said.

The results, published in the journal Significance, also provide an appreciation for how hard it is to make the Olympics, Chow added.

“When we watch track-and-field athletes compete, we are witnessing a statistical anomaly: someone who is both at the peak of their physical performance, while also benefiting from extremely fortuitous timing,” Chow said.

More information

The National Academy of Sports Medicine has more about athletic training.

SOURCE: University of Waterloo, news release, July 24, 2024

Los Angeles, has a thriving startup ecosystem with numerous accelerators, incubators, and programs designed to support and nurture new businesses. These programs provide a range of services, including funding, mentorship, workspace, networking opportunities, and strategic guidance to help entrepreneurs develop their ideas and scale their companies.

Techstars Los Angeles

Techstars is a global outfit with a chapter in Los Angeles that opened in 2017. It prioritizes local companies but will fund some firms based outside of LA.

Location: Culver City

Type of Funding: Pre-seed, early stage

Focus: Industry Agnostic

Notable Past Companies: StokedPlastic, Zeno Power

Grid110

Grid110 offers no-cost, no-equity programs for entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, including a 12-week Residency accelerator for early-stage startups, an Idea to Launch Bootcamp for pre-launch entrepreneurs, and specialized programs like the PledgeLA Founders Fund and Friends & Family program, all aimed at providing essential skills, resources, and support to help founders develop and grow their businesses.

Location: DTLA

Type of Funding: Seed, early stage

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Idealab

Idealab is a renowned startup studio and incubator based in Pasadena, California. Founded in 1996 by entrepreneur Bill Gross, Idealab has a long history of nurturing innovative technology companies, with over 150 startups launched and 45 successful IPOs and acquisitions, including notable successes like Coinbase and Tenor.

Location: Pasadena

Type of Funding: Stage agnostic

Focus: Industry Agnostic, AI/Robotics, Consumer, Clean Energy

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Plug In South LA

Plug In South LA is a tech accelerator program focused on supporting and empowering Black and Latinx entrepreneurs in the Los Angeles area. The 12-week intensive program provides early-stage founders with mentorship, workshops, strategic guidance, potential pilot partnerships, grant funding, and networking opportunities to help them scale their businesses and secure investment.

Location: Los Angeles

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Cedars-Sinai Accelerator

The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator is a three-month program based in Los Angeles that provides healthcare startups with $100,000 in funding, mentorship from over 300 leading clinicians and executives, and access to Cedars-Sinai’s clinical expertise and resources. The program aims to transform healthcare quality, efficiency, and care delivery by helping entrepreneurs bring their innovative technology products to market, offering participants dedicated office space, exposure to a broad network of healthcare entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch their companies at a Demo Day.

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MedTech Innovator

MedTech Innovator is the world’s largest accelerator for medical technology companies, based in Los Angeles, offering a four-month program that provides selected startups with unparalleled access to industry leaders, investors, and resources without taking equity. The accelerator culminates in showcase events and competitions where participating companies can win substantial non-dilutive funding, with the program having a strong track record of helping startups secure FDA approvals and significant follow-on funding.

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KidsX

The KidsX Accelerator in Los Angeles is a 10-week program that supports early-stage digital health companies focused on pediatric care, providing mentorship, resources, and access to a network of children’s hospitals to help startups validate product-market fit and scale their solutions. The accelerator uses a reverse pitch model, where participating hospitals identify focus areas and work closely with selected startups to develop and pilot digital health solutions that address specific pediatric needs.

Location: East Hollywood

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Disney Accelerator

Disney Accelerator is a startup accelerator that provides early-stage companies in the consumer media, entertainment and technology sectors with mentorship, guidance, and investment from Disney executives. The program, now in its 10th year, aims to foster collaborations and partnerships between innovative technology companies and The Walt Disney Company to help them accelerate their growth and bring new experiences to Disney audiences.

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Techstars Space Accelerator

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Location: Los Angeles

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Focus: Aerospace

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I competed at the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as an elite rhythmic gymnast, and after training from the age of six until I was 22, I thought I had developed all the necessary habits for a healthy life: how to eat right, exercise, handle my emotions and take care of my body.

But upon retiring, I struggled to run for more than a minute on the treadmill, and I couldn’t tell when I was full or hungry. After having access to the best mental health resources and physical therapists the world could offer, why was I suddenly having trouble with the basics? Hadn’t I been trained to know my own body, mind and the connection between the two – better than most?

I’d been skinny, all muscle and capable of managing pain for so long. But that didn’t mean I knew what being healthy meant.

Though an overall bill of health might look different for an athlete in peak training form as compared to a retired one, experts say balance is what matters the most. Every aspect of health – physical, mental and emotional – needs to carry equal weight.

Katie Spada, a former college synchronized swimmer turned registered dietician and nutritionist, says that due to the rigor of extreme fitness, athletes are not always as healthy as people might think.

All athletes, Spada observes, will be objectively “healthy” in certain respects, such as having a lean body mass, low resting heart rate and low blood pressure. On the other hand, they might be “unhealthy” in terms of underfueling – female athletes, for example, can develop reproductive health issues due to not having a menstrual cycle while training, which could impact their fertility down the line.

Olympians are defined by a single-minded focus, discipline and perfectionism. But these traits can so easily become toxic during an athletic career, and especially after. You can’t always tell who’s healthy just by how they look, what they say, or even what they do. Doing the right things, like drinking enough water or sleeping eight hours, is undoubtedly important. But health is so much more complicated than that.

Health as ‘fitness’: the fallacy of perfection

When I retired, I was confused about why the habits I equated with health – precise food intake, constant exercise, proprioception – weren’t carrying over into my new life.

“A lot of times when we see fitness, we think health,” says Alexi Pappas, a runner in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, author and advocate for mental health in sport.

“But it’s like comparing apples to oranges,” Pappas says of the transition to retirement. “It’s a little bit myopic to say that the only thing that’s changed is that you’re not competing, when in reality everything’s different.”

Athletes can also be perfectionists, which means that guilt often functions as motivation.

“The recommendation for the average adult is 150 minutes of exercise a week, but most athletes do that in one day, or in one session. So there’s a big gap once athletes retire, because they are known for these behaviors, and they get [rewarded] for being disciplined or motivated,” says Spada. But if athletes continue to aim for this same expectation when it no longer makes sense, that same behavior will get diagnosed as disordered.

An Olympian is used to fine-tuning themselves meticulously every day. The challenge is to readjust expectations, because any new routines will inevitably be less rigorous than the old ones. Exercise for enjoyment, or for basic health, is a concept most athletes have to relearn. We are trained to know what we’ll be doing every day for years, not how to live a life without structure or timeline.

Though this discrepancy always poses a risk, it only becomes an issue for most athletes when they become “Narps”, or what collegiate student-athletes affectionately call “non-athletic regular people”.

It takes kindness, compassion and outside help to realize that sports are not real life. Eventually, it becomes less about regaining control than it does about accepting present circumstances. “When people struggle with their post-athletic career, they need to look at their bigger life and ask themselves, ‘Am I happy with the life choices I’m making? Am I happy with my life?’ Because if they’re not happy with their life, they’re never going to be happy with their body,” says Pappas.

Why balance and mental health are key

Athletes have to remember to incorporate social and emotional balance into their life, because it isn’t the default.

Based on her experience with her post-athletic clients, Spada suspects that chronic stress is one of the leading predictors for future health issues.

“Having that constant level of stress is going to impact you. Stress precedes free radicals, which is what creates cancer, and can lead to chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes. The body has to manage that stress somehow, and oftentimes, it leads to autoimmune disorders, which is probably the most common disease I’ve seen in athletes so far.”

Spada says someone whose physical health is improving, but whose mental health is deteriorating, doesn’t count as being healthy. In nutrition, both the physical impact food has on one’s body and the mental relationship one has to food are equally important. “If you don’t feel confident making food choices mentally, it’s not going to benefit you physically,” she says.

Counterbalancing rigid training schedules is important for athletes who are still competing too: Jessica Parratto, a 12-time USA Diving National Champion on her way to Paris for her third Olympics says she needs to “feel balanced in order to be successful”.

She makes space for activities that make her “feel human again and ‘normal’,” like eating junk food or hanging out with friends. “The longer I am hyper focused on being the most regimented, healthy athlete I can be, the more chance there will be for burnout,” she says.

Dr Roberta Kraus, president of the Center for Sports Psychology in Colorado Springs, has worked with elite athletes for over 30 years. She helped lead the Pivot program, a United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee initiative that helps athletes transition after they retire from sport, equipping them with career resources, financial literacy education and access to psychological services.

The single-minded focus of an Olympian, so instrumental to breaking records and achieving athletic success, can prove destructive in the face of life choices that follow. In the aftermath, most athletes don’t know where or how to redirect their focus, while the people who helped manage every element of their professional life are no longer responsible for helping them.

Kraus believes that “just like drug testing is required [once athletes become elite], mental health coaching and seminars on how to manage life after sport” should be required too.

Kraus has also observed a proliferation of “snowplow parents” – parents who invest so much time and money in their child’s pursuits that they begin to feel entitled to some equity in that success – leading to less independent and resilient young people. In addition, she says, coaches don’t want to discuss retirement with Olympians while they’re still training, because they worry “they’re going to derail the athlete’s attention”.

Most athletes start young, and never learn how to apply the soft tools they’ve gained over the years to other spheres of life: how can discipline lead to a job opportunity, or single-minded focus help with decisions about the next stage of life?

“We don’t show athletes the bigger picture,” Kraus says. “We only show them what it’s going to take to get on the podium.”

Rethinking the relationship to food and weight

Many athletes are misinformed about food, and the relationships they develop with it can be problematic. After I retired, I worked extensively with Spada to unpack my nutritional traumas, and she was instrumental to both my recovery and my sanity. She has now had more than 100 clients who are former athletes struggling with their nutritional needs.

“Being fearful of food is not healthy, period,” she says; for instance, eating sugar or fat shouldn’t cause guilt and shame. According to Spada, coaches can make the mistake of being concerned about an athlete’s weight as opposed to their body composition, blaming pounds on the scale for what is in fact a concern about performance ability.

The issue stems from a lack of effective communication, and a lack of education about nutrition.

“When I was competing, if you had to go see the dietician it was either because you were ‘fat’ or you had an eating disorder,” she says. “There was no viewing nutrition as a tool like strength and conditioning.” If the stigma were properly addressed, “we could prevent a lot of challenging conversations, so everyone could understand what the role of food really is.”

Another problematic health practice among athletes is weight cycling. It’s normal – and often necessary – for athletes’ weight to increase or decrease dramatically relative to their competitive season, because it’s impossible to sustain a peak forever.

“But we have seen now in research that weight cycling is more detrimental to one’s health than weight maintenance, regardless of where your weight falls,” Spada says. Gaining and losing 10 to 20lb during a season is standard for some athletes, but this puts pressure on their cardiovascular system. A consistent higher weight “is still healthier than if you were to cycle through weight ranges – outside of the extreme categories of really underweight, or obese,” she says.

How I learned to be healthy after my Olympic career

Caring about my fitness had always served me both physically and professionally. After I retired, I tried to maintain a semi-strict exercise routine, and dutifully keep track of everything I ate. But it quickly became frustrating. What was the point of being healthy if it wasn’t making me the best at something anymore?

I had to learn to make peace with the fact that pursuing new priorities meant making certain trade-offs, and that I didn’t need to aim for some idealized version of myself anymore – I just needed to be the healthiest version of me now. I needed to be honest, and forgive myself for what felt like a lack of accountability. Obsessing over my body and behaviors had served me well as an athlete, but proved a burden in real life.

Focus is what got me to the Olympics, but the opposite of focus is what makes me healthy now. The more I let go of artificial health goals, the healthier I become. Pappas describes health as a state of flow, in which your body “[moves] with you in this kind of harmony”. Rather than strive for excellence, I strive for moderation. By letting go of hard goals in favor of soft ones, my understanding of health has become more flexible, and ultimately more sustainable. For the first time in my life, the less I work hard at something, the more successful I become.