Elite swimmers have a certain type of stubbornness. Due to years of exposure to chlorine and early mornings, the majority of athletes who have touched Olympic gold by the age of 19 are finished before turning thirty. Most people weren’t like Anthony Ervin.
Sixteen years after winning the 50-meter freestyle at the Sydney Games, he became the oldest individual gold medal winner in Olympic swimming history when he stood on the blocks in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 at the age of thirty-five. It is nearly impossible to contain that gap in your mind alone.
It’s important to consider what that actually means. At twenty-two, Ervin had completely given up competitive swimming. He put his 2000 gold medal up for auction on eBay, donating the proceeds to tsunami survivors. He then drifted for years, experimenting with the guitar, learning Buddhism, according to his own account, abusing drugs.
Sometimes he was barely able to get off a sofa. At the age of thirty-one, he resumed training after ceasing to disclose that he had ever been an Olympian. The medals eventually returned along with the sport he had given up. In that arc, it’s difficult to find anything truly odd and compelling.
In the lengthy history of swimmers who simply refused to accept that age had written them off, Ervin is arguably the most striking example. John Arthur Jarvis, a house painter from Leicester who won an Olympic gold medal in Paris in 1900, had a remarkable career in international swimming for over ten years.
He created a revolutionary kick technique with a professional named Joey Nuttall, won 108 titles throughout Europe inspired his city to take a strong interest in a sport that had previously been largely disregarded. Leicester’s first municipal baths didn’t open until 1879. Jarvis became a national celebrity by 1900.
With these long careers, there’s something in the water, so to speak. The sheer amount of yards swum, the repetitive strain the way minor mechanical defects build up into injuries over years make elite swimming extremely physically demanding. The majority of swimmers reach their peak in their early to mid-twenties before progressively declining.
The people who don’t typically have something else going on in addition to their talent, such as the ability to reinvent themselves, a peculiar connection to suffering, or a psychological structure that just won’t let them stop. In this sense, Ervin has described his Tourette syndrome as surprisingly helpful. The disorder taught him how to control his anxiety at an early age the same coping strategy kept him composed during the Olympic finals.
A different kind of longevity is represented by Alice Dearing, who made British swimming history in Tokyo in 2021 by being the first Black woman to compete for Team GB in swimming at an Olympic Games. She has ten years of experience at the senior international level, multiple World Aquatics Championship appearances a career that is as much defined by her accomplishments outside of the pool as it is inside.
While still competing at the top level, she co-founded the Black Swimming Association in 2020. When she retired, she characterized herself as a woman advancing rather than a swimmer retreating. That distinction is important.
It’s still unclear if the trend toward older elite swimmers is due to improved sports science, more advanced recovery techniques, or just a change in the way athletes view their own lifespans. It might be all three.
What is evident is that the notion of a single, definitive peak appears early and causes fast fits to swim less neatly than they used to. Compared to his gold from 2000, Ervin’s gold from 2016 was faster. At thirty-one, he placed fifth at thirty-five, he placed first. Simply put, the line doesn’t slope as it should.
As these careers develop, it seems that the oldest Olympic swimmers aren’t always motivated by a pure love of competition. Unfinished business can occur at times. Sometimes it has nothing to do with a scoreboard; it’s a need to prove something to oneself.
Ervin’s memoir, “Chasing Water”, suggests that he was a man who discovered that the pool was the only place where things made sense again following years of chaos. It’s not really a sports story. It’s more akin to a swim cap-clad survival tale.