the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

we already know
- fast beats slow
- big beats small
- young beats old
- strong beats weak
(except in "internal" )

but how about at the elite (Olympic in this case) combat sport level?

TL;DR: 27 is roughly the average age for champions in wrestling, judo, taekwondo. 24-25 for boxing.
in wrestling, some gold medalists have been 40+ (boxing changed the age limit to 40 in 20-teens so the data have a "bias" that cannot be compared).
also, heavyweight wrestlers can compete at this level for longer (guess because the fast>slow aspect is more key in lighter weight classes?).

https://judotraining.info/previous-resu ... okyo-2021/
https://www.guresdosyasi.com/guresar.pdf
https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/1004 ... _31-41.pdf

in judo, the drop off after that seems pretty rapid

if you are 28, you are over the hill...

made me think of Rock&Roll's 27 club

Oof different kind of peak

What would be really interesting is to see what percentage of those age groups have children. Because what this graph doesn't tell you is if people fall off because of physical ability or because they have other things going on, especially as the olympics comes every 5 years. That's a big commitment and maybe only achievable if you don't have other responsiblities.