ENJOY THE GAME

PLAYING OVERTIME

FELIX VARGA

September 10, 2026

Cristiano Ronaldo was forty-one at the 2026 World Cup, an age at which a footballer is generally expected to own a club rather than play for one. But compared with some professional athletes, he is practically a junior. From footballers approaching sixty to tennis players, free divers, chess masters, and racing drivers who refuse the usual timetable of decline, Felix Varga considers what happens when accumulated experience begins to compensate for lost speed, and the body discovers its own late style.

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Cristiano Ronaldo played in the 2026 World Cup at the age of forty-one. In football terms, this is roughly equivalent to Methuselah turning up for preseason training. The average professional footballer is finished before thirty-five. Many begin their decline before thirty. By forty, the former player is supposed to have migrated to television, management, ownership, or some pleasantly remunerated ambassadorial position involving watches and airlines. Ronaldo, instead, was still there, on the field, facing men young enough to have had his poster on their teenage bedroom walls. His presence produced the usual astonishment. Commentators spoke about his discipline, his diet, his sleep, his training regime, his extraordinary physical condition. There was something slightly forensic about the fascination, as though the continued existence of an elite athlete after forty required a scientific explanation. Ronaldo had become less a football player than an experiment in the postponement of time.

And yet forty-one, it turns out, is not particularly old. There are athletes who make Ronaldo look positively adolescent. Kazuyoshi Miura, the Japanese footballer universally known as King Kazu, is still playing professionally at fifty-nine. Born in 1967, Miura began his career in Brazil in the 1980s, then returned to Japan to become one of the foundational figures of the J.League. He was already playing before many of his later teammates were born. Coaches retired, clubs disappeared, and football changed its rules, economics, hairstyles, boots, and television contracts. Miura continued turning up. In July 2026, at fifty-nine years and 149 days old, he did something even more inconvenient for anyone wishing to regard his career as ceremonial: He scored. Playing for Fukushima United in the Emperor’s Cup, Miura found the net in a 7–0 victory, his first competitive goal in almost four years. He is preparing for his forty-second professional season, with a contract carrying him into 2027 and, barring injury or common sense, his sixties. At a certain point, longevity ceases to be a statistic and becomes something closer to performance art.

Kazuyoshi Miura has watched generations of footballers retire. Someone had to stay and keep an eye on the ball.

There is an obvious temptation to treat such people as biological curiosities. What did they eat? How did they train? How much did they sleep? What genes did they inherit? These questions are understandable, but they are also slightly disappointing. They reduce something existential to something nutritional. The more interesting question is not simply how they continued, but why. Professional sport is one of the few areas of contemporary life in which age discrimination is not merely tolerated but regarded as common sense. Nobody is scandalized when a thirty-seven-year-old footballer is described as old. A forty-year-old novelist would be considered young, a forty-year-old politician practically embryonic, and a museum director of forty precocious. An athlete of forty, however, is treated as having somehow escaped from a retirement home.

Sport compresses human life into an absurdly accelerated chronology. Childhood becomes training, adolescence apprenticeship, your twenties maturity, thirty late style, thirty-five decline, and forty an afterlife. Perhaps this is why the older athlete is so fascinating: He exposes the artificiality of the timetable. The biological facts are real, of course. Speed declines, recovery slows, explosiveness diminishes, flexibility changes, reaction times deteriorate. But athletic ability is not a single quantity that rises, peaks, and disappears. Judgment can improve. Anticipation can improve. Technique can become more economical. Emotional control can become considerably better. The old athlete loses milliseconds and gains foresight.

Serena Williams did something stranger. After nearly four years away from professional tennis, she returned in 2026 at forty-four, first in doubles at Queen’s and then, improbably, at Centre Court at Wimbledon. Her opponent, Maya Joint, was twenty, less than half her age. Williams lost, but only after taking the match to three sets over two hours and twenty-two minutes. At forty-four, having had two children and effectively retiring from professional tennis, she was not appearing in an exhibition or a ceremonial legends match. She was back in the Wimbledon singles draw, serving at more than 120 miles per hour against a player born after she had already won six Grand Slam titles. The remarkable thing was no longer that Serena Williams had lasted so long. She had stopped, lived another life, and then come back.

Serena Williams serves another reminder that experience can arrive at considerable speed.

Martina Navratilova took the proposition further. After dominating tennis in the 1970s and 1980s, she returned to regular doubles competition in her forties and even played singles at Wimbledon again at forty-seven. In 2006, one month short of her fiftieth birthday, she partnered Bob Bryan at the US Open and won the mixed-doubles championship. It was her fifty-ninth Grand Slam title and her final professional appearance. There is something almost offensively elegant about retiring at forty-nine by winning the US Open. Navratilova later said she believed she could physically have continued for another five years. She did not leave because the game expelled her. She left because, after more than three decades of professional tennis, she had finally had enough.

Most sporting careers end because the athlete is no longer selected, no longer ranked, no longer fast enough, or sufficiently damaged that the body makes the decision on his or her behalf. Navratilova inverted the normal arrangement. She was nearly fifty, had just won a Grand Slam, and decided that the conversation was over. It is difficult to imagine a more emphatic rejection of the idea that the sporting body has an administratively determined expiration date.

Martina Navratilova and Bob Bryan share the silverware. The conventional retirement age takes home nothing.

Mansour Bahrami represents a different version of tennis longevity. Born in Iran in 1956, he had an unusual professional career, interrupted by revolution and circumstances that prevented him from following the conventional trajectory of an international player. Yet he continued playing exhibition tennis into his later decades, becoming famous not simply for surviving on court but for transforming tennis into something between competition, comedy, and theater. Behind-the-back volleys, impossible angles, exaggerated drop shots, and sleights of hand became part of a repertoire that depended on a lifetime of intimacy with the ball. Bahrami was no longer faster than the younger players. He simply knew things they did not.

Youth tends to solve physical problems through abundance: run faster, jump higher, hit harder, recover quicker. The older athlete has less abundance available and therefore develops economy. Movement becomes selective, and energy something to budget rather than spend. There is an elegance in this. One sees it in older tennis players who somehow seem to be standing where the ball is going before it arrives, in footballers who stop making unnecessary runs, and in boxers who understand distance so precisely that they appear to move less than their opponents. The body becomes less spectacular and more intelligent.

Mansour Bahrami puts his racket behind him. After decades on court, he has a fairly good idea where the ball will be.

Free diving offers an especially interesting example because age behaves differently there. The sport requires extraordinary physical conditioning, but also something youth does not automatically provide: calm. The successful free diver must suppress panic while descending into an environment in which virtually every instinct in the human body is screaming for a return to the surface. Experience matters, economy matters, and knowing yourself matters. An older practitioner may have less raw physiological capacity than a younger one but considerably more knowledge about how to spend it.

Natalia Molchanova makes the point almost absurdly well because she did not merely continue a youthful career into middle age. She effectively began one there. The Russian swimmer took up free diving seriously around forty, an age at which most elite athletes have already accumulated a decade of retirement photographs. She went on to become arguably the greatest female free diver of her era, setting world records across multiple disciplines and continuing to establish them into her fifties. Her career complicates the entire premise of athletic longevity. The usual story assumes that the older athlete possesses a finite quantity of talent accumulated in youth and is attempting to preserve it against decline. Molchanova suggests something more interesting: At forty, there may still be abilities that have not even been discovered.

Free diving also makes unusually visible the transition from force to knowledge. There is only so much oxygen. Panic wastes it. Unnecessary movement wastes it. Tension wastes it. The successful diver must be extraordinarily economical, and this is precisely where experience can become physical. Calm is not an abstract virtue when you are a hundred meters underwater on one breath. It is part of the machinery keeping you alive. What looks psychological becomes physiological, and the distinction between an experienced mind and an experienced body begins to disappear.

In free diving, experience helps you keep calm. The oxygen budget leaves little room for drama.

The same principle appears in radically different form in motor racing. Formula One would seem at first to belong entirely to youth: reaction speed, extraordinary cardiovascular demands, heat, G-forces, and the ability to make decisions at more than three hundred kilometers per hour while another car is just centimeters away. Yet Fernando Alonso turned forty-five in July 2026 and remains a Formula One driver. He made his Grand Prix debut in 2001, when several current competitors were children or not yet born. More than a quarter of a century later, he is still sharing the same grid with them.

Alonso is particularly interesting because racing exposes the inadequacy of talking about reaction time in isolation. A younger driver may possess marginally faster reflexes, but the experienced driver has spent decades learning what is likely to happen before the reflex is required. He recognizes the movement of a car, the degradation of a tire, the behavior of an opponent, the changing grip of a circuit. At three hundred kilometers per hour, anticipation may be more valuable than reaction because by the time something has happened, it is frequently too late to react to it anyway. The experienced driver does not necessarily respond faster. He begins responding earlier.

Fernando Alonso brings decades of experience to the cockpit. There is very little time to consult the manual.

But Alonso is a child compared with Hershel McGriff. The US stock-car racer began competing in the 1940s and raced in the inaugural Southern 500 at Darlington in 1950. In 2018 he returned to NASCAR-sanctioned competition at Tucson Speedway at the age of ninety. His competitors included teenagers. The age difference between McGriff and the youngest drivers was more than seventy years, meaning that he could have raced against their grandfathers and, with some scheduling ingenuity, perhaps their great-grandfathers as well. He did not win. That almost improves the story. At ninety, merely fastening yourself into a racing car and entering an actual competition against people who have recently completed high school represents a fairly decisive rejection of the conventional retirement plan.

Motor racing is admittedly a complicated example because the machine does some of the moving. But anyone who thinks this removes the athletic component should spend two hours inside a racing car under competitive conditions. The physical strain is considerable, and the possibility of error carries consequences rather more serious than losing a service game. McGriff’s achievement is interesting precisely because it sits at the outer edge of what seems reasonable. Forty-five can be explained by exceptional fitness. Fifty-nine begins to look eccentric. Ninety requires another vocabulary.

For Hershel McGriff, growing older was no reason to get out of the racing car. Getting in might simply take a little longer.

Chess pushes the argument in the opposite direction because it sits outside what we ordinarily call sport. There is no sprinting, jumping, or throwing, yet elite chess exerts many of the same pressures: endurance, fatigue, competition, preparation, nerves, and the relentless measurement of one person against another. Chess players age, too. Processing speed may slow, stamina may decline, and younger players arrive armed with enormous quantities of computer preparation. Yet older masters possess something difficult to quantify: tens of thousands of positions stored somewhere between memory and instinct. They do not necessarily calculate everything because they recognize things.

Viktor Korchnoi made an entire late career out of refusing to observe the expected chronology. Born in Leningrad in 1931, he was already one of the strongest chess players in the world in the 1960s, and twice challenged Anatoly Karpov for the world championship. That should have been enough for several careers. Instead, Korchnoi continued playing competitive chess into his late seventies and eighties. At seventy-nine he defeated Fabiano Caruana, who was fifty-eight years younger and would become one of the defining grandmasters of the next generation. The image is almost too neat: a man formed by Soviet chess culture before the computer age sitting across from a player raised in the era of databases, and beating him anyway.

Chess makes the distinction between calculation and recognition especially clear. A young grandmaster may calculate variations with extraordinary speed, but an older master has encountered structures, tactical motifs, endings, and psychological situations thousands of times. He may not need to calculate every branch because he knows which branches are unlikely to contain anything worth finding. This is expertise in its purest form: not knowing more things so much as knowing what can safely be ignored. The young competitor encounters a situation and reacts to it; the old one has seen some version of it before.

Viktor Korchnoi presses the clock. Having more years behind you is no reason to give your opponent another second.

This is also why the cliché that older athletes compensate for physical decline with “experience” does not quite capture what is happening. “Experience” sounds passive, like a collection of memories. At the highest level it becomes an active physical resource. The older tennis player moves sooner because she reads the opponent’s preparation. The footballer makes fewer runs because he recognizes which runs matter. The racing driver anticipates instability before the car begins to slide. The chess player abandons a variation without calculating it to the end. The free diver knows the difference between discomfort and danger. Years of repetition have migrated from conscious thought into action.

None of this means that age inevitably produces wisdom, nor that experience magically compensates for physical deterioration. Eventually the arithmetic becomes unforgiving. Knees fail, tendons rupture, eyesight deteriorates, and recovery becomes slower than the calendar of competition permits. Time wins. But it does not necessarily win when we expect it to. This is what makes people such as Miura compelling. Their achievement is not immortality, but delay. They occupy a peculiar territory between professionalism and obsession. At fifty or sixty, continuing to compete cannot always be explained by money or fame, and it cannot simply be nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backward; competition takes place now.

To compete means submitting yourself to the possibility of losing, and that distinction matters. There are countless former champions who remain in excellent physical condition, train constantly, play exhibitions, appear at charity events, and occasionally demonstrate that the old machinery still works. But genuine competition is different because nobody is obliged to respect your history. The scoreboard has no nostalgia, and a twenty-two-year-old opponent owes you nothing because you were famous before he was born. Senior tours are admirable, but they create protected ecosystems of age. The older professional competing in an open field does something more unsettling: He enters a structure designed largely for younger bodies and insists that the structure accommodate him. There is something faintly impolite about it.

There is also something distinctly modern about our fascination with these people. Professional sport has spent the last several decades becoming more scientific about almost everything: diet, sleep, recovery, biomechanics, injury prevention, training loads, psychology. Careers that once ended because a damaged knee simply remained damaged can now be prolonged through surgery and rehabilitation. Players travel with physiotherapists, nutritionists, strength coaches, chefs, and sleep consultants. The modern athlete is surrounded by a small administrative state devoted to keeping the body operational. Some of what looks like a revolution in aging is therefore simply the result of vastly improved maintenance.

The shirt comes off. The competitive instinct is considerably harder to remove.

But maintenance alone does not explain it. Plenty of younger athletes with access to the same science retire. The more interesting change may be psychological. The idea of forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy no longer carries quite the same instructions it once did. The calendar says one thing; the person standing inside the calendar may feel something else entirely.

Society has elaborate expectations about the proper sequence of life. You are supposed to begin, develop, peak, withdraw, and eventually become a spectator of the activity that once defined you. Sport makes this sequence unusually visible because results can be measured. There is a ranking, a stopwatch, a score. The older athlete refuses the final transition, not forever, but for another season. This refusal has become more interesting because the category of old age itself is becoming unstable. Today, a healthy fifty-five-year-old may have decades of active life ahead. Someone of sixty may still work for another fifteen years. People begin businesses at seventy, write books at eighty, and fall in love at ninety. Yet our cultural imagination of physical life remains oddly Victorian. We continue to behave as though serious bodily ambition belongs almost exclusively to youth.

Professional sport reinforces this prejudice because elite competition genuinely does favor young bodies. The mistake is extrapolating its timetable to ordinary life. If a footballer is old at thirty-six, we begin unconsciously to imagine that thirty-six is physically old. If a tennis player retires at thirty-eight, forty begins to sound like an age at which vigorous physical ambition is somehow eccentric. The absurdity becomes obvious when one remembers that a person retiring from professional sport at thirty-eight may have another fifty years of life remaining. The athlete has retired; the body has not.

Perhaps Molchanova is therefore as important to this story as Miura. Miura asks how long something can be continued. Molchanova asks how late something can begin. These are related but quite different challenges to the conventional narrative of aging. One stretches the end of the chronology; the other rearranges its beginning. Together they suggest that the familiar arc—learn young, peak early, decline gracefully—is less a law than a particularly persistent piece of storytelling.

This may be the most useful lesson of sporting longevity: not that everyone should attempt to become a professional athlete at sixty, which would be ridiculous, but that the limits we assign to bodies are partly biological and partly narrative. We tell ourselves stories about what particular ages mean, and then behave accordingly. There are seventy-year-olds who move beautifully and forty-year-olds who have effectively abandoned their bodies. There are people who begin swimming at sixty, cycling at seventy, or strength training at eighty and discover not merely that they can still improve, but that improvement itself changes their relationship to age. What is surprising is not that the body eventually deteriorates; that was never in doubt. What is surprising is how long it remains capable of adaptation.

The examples become increasingly absurd as the numbers rise. Ronaldo at forty-one initially appears ancient; Alonso at forty-five makes him seem slightly less so. Navratilova wins a Grand Slam at forty-nine. Molchanova sets records in her fifties. Miura scores a professional football goal at fifty-nine. Korchnoi defeats one of the world’s great young chess players on the threshold of eighty. McGriff straps himself into a racing car at ninety. The progression is comic, but it also exposes something about our perception of age. Forty only appears old when the comparison is twenty. Place it next to ninety, and it suddenly looks like the beginning of something.

This is perhaps why the sight of an old athlete can be unexpectedly moving. We do not believe he will defeat time; we know better. The younger opponent will eventually arrive, the legs will eventually slow, the lungs will eventually refuse, and there will be a final match, although the athlete may not know it is the final match when it begins. Every sporting career ends in defeat of one kind or another. What remains remarkable is the possibility of continuation before that defeat arrives: another season, another tournament, another match, another point. The old athlete does not defeat time so much as negotiate with it, exchanging speed for precision, recovery for patience, power for technique, and physical abundance for an increasingly exact knowledge of what is necessary.

Novak Djokovic wins his 47th Grand Slam at the age of seventy-six.

Perhaps this is what “late style” really means. In art, late style is often discussed as if old age strips away the unnecessary. Titian’s paintings loosen, Beethoven becomes stranger, Matisse begins cutting directly into color. The work is not necessarily calmer; often it’s the opposite. Conventions fall away because there is less reason to obey them. Something similar happens to the athletic body. The young athlete demonstrates what the body can do. The old athlete demonstrates what it knows.

Somewhere, on some field, court, board, range, circuit, or track, there is always somebody who has stayed longer than expected. The spectators have changed, the opponents have changed, perhaps even the rules have changed. He is slower now, and everyone can see it. He knows it too. But he has also learned what speed cannot teach: where to stand, when to wait, what not to do, and how little movement may actually be necessary. Eventually, none of this will be enough. For the moment, however, the competition has begun, his name is still on the board, and the result has not yet been decided. He looks at the target and throws the dart anyway.

Felix Varga (b. 1968 in Montevideo) is a writer and former semiprofessional basketball player. He studied sports medicine and sports history and writes about aging, competition, endurance, and the increasingly negotiable boundary between playing and stopping. He remains convinced that most athletes retire too early.

Cover image: Cristiano Ronaldo has reached the age when footballers usually explain the match from a studio. He would rather be in it.