I’m not sure when it happened, but it worries me that I seem to have grown old somehow, and there doesn’t appear to be much I can do about it. Suddenly all the hottest athletic talent is younger than me. The top picks for the NBA Draft look like they have barely left high school, the fastest race-car drivers surely can’t be old enough to be sitting behind the wheel on a public highway and the biography section in my local bookstore is stuffed with accounts from sports stars not even halfway through their careers.

As a kid, it was easy to look up to my sports heroes. God-given ability aside, I was always taught to look up to my elders (and back then I was shorter than them, too.) Now, though, it’s getting a little more complicated. I still have my childhood heroes, but as they retire year-by-year, I have to turn to fresh—and inevitably younger—blood. Admittedly I still have to look up to a lot of them—every single basketball player towers above me—but it’s hard to feel quite the same about someone who was still in diapers when I was at the peak of my sporting prowess in high school.

A critical part in having a hero is that you can be inspired by them and can dream of following in their footsteps. Every fan harbors the delusion that one of these days, a professional scout is going to discover their incredible throwing arm, right foot or whatever other body part or skill might catapult them from the sidelines to stardom. As time passes, though, the number of athletes’ careers I have any chance of mimicking and the number of sports I might somehow still be eligible for are shrinking fast.

There’s always a scattering of male and female athletes who are unwilling to accept defeat with the loss of their youth, but they can normally count on both serious skill and a history of training and competing at the top level. And even that isn’t always enough—take Formula-1 driver Michael Schumacher for example. I wouldn’t write him off from winning more races, but his comeback hasn’t even compare to the bar he set just a few short years ago.

However, I can’t even count on past experience—I can’t claim to have ever trained as hard as most college athletes during my extended life at university—so I’m starting from scratch. A trip to the gym highlights the physiological disadvantage I face—the maximum heart rate graph seems to imply I might die if I aim for the same intensity level as a few years ago.

Athletes in sports requiring raw power or speed usually peak at a younger age, but sports that are focused more on endurance and skill can be better suited to the slightly older. That means that I might still have a chance if I set my sights differently. Football, soccer and basketball are out. So perhaps that means I could focus on cycling or triathlons, or maybe I have to turn to darts.

But if I do that, then what happens to the sports I’ve followed for so long? To be really, really good at anything, you need the ability and concentration to shut everything out in order to focus intently on your goal and not get distracted. Learning and perfecting a new sport would consume everything. Even if I didn’t become one myself, I might well find some new heroes, but at the expense of old ones.

Faced with the unstoppable passage of time, what should I do? I could take the easy way out and choose to simply ignore the new stars, spending my time harking back to misty-eyed memories of the good ole days of my youth, when athletes were real athletes and sport was pure. Perhaps I could drop by the physics department to see if they’ve made any progress on building a time machine.

Or maybe I need to accept the hard truth; it’s time to stop dreaming I’ll ever beat these younger and better athletes—I should be dreaming about ordering them around instead. The top coaches are all much older than me and surely it’s only a matter of time before a rich team-owner realizes my potential.

 

@@line:Tom Taylor might want to try the sport of croquet, which requires little physical prowess but does reward a solid understanding of geometry and physics. If not, he can always try his hand at speed golf or beer pong. Suggest a new sport for him [email protected].