When Do Hammer Throwers Hit Their Prime?

After the US championships, blogger Jesse Squire discussed a question many track fans are wondering: will Athens 400m Olympic champion Jeremy Wariner ever be able to break 44-seconds again? At 27-years old, most people say that Wariner still has his prime ahead of him. Squire looked a little deeper and found that this is just not the case in the 400 meters.

Wariner is not “relatively young” or “hardly ancient”. He is ancient by the standards of the 400 meters. It is an event that chews people up and spits them out. Only marathoners’ careers have shorter life spans. The gold standard of quarter-miling, breaking 44.00, has been done 47 times by nine athletes. Only once has it ever been done by a man older than 26 whose name was not Michael Johnson. All realistic analyses of the event should ignore Johnson—he was to long sprinting as Secretariat was to three-year-old racing, a once in a century outlier. If you look at those eight other mere mortals, the median age for a sub-44.00 is twenty-two…

Bondarchuk was one of hammer throw’s latest bloomers. He set his personal best at age 36, but he also did not begin the hammer until his mid-twenties.

This made me think about the hammer throw. I tend to assume that hammer throwers reach their peaks in their earlier thirties since Sedykh threw his world record at age 31. American record holder Lance Deal threw over 80 meters until his 39th birthday. Other hammer throwers have had an even longer shelf life. Sidorenko broke 80 meters at age 40, and Igor Astapkovich broke 80 meters for 20 years, from age 22 to 41. He even was the top qualifier at the World Championships when he was 40.

But just because athletes have long career doesn’t necessarily mean they reach their peak later. And after a little research I found out he was not alone. I compiled a list of the top 20 throwers of all-time (excluding Ivan Tikhon, Vadi Devyatovskiy, and Adrián Annus since all served doping banns near their primes). Whether you look at the mean, the median, or the mode, the average thrower reached their personal best during the year of their 28 or 29th birthday.

What is more interesting is that everyone but Sedykh started their peak even earlier, even if they did not reach their ultimate best until a later age. Nine of the twenty throwers had reached their peak by age 27. Another ten were on average just 93cm under their personal best by the age of 27. For example, Heinz Weis reached his personal best at age 34, but has his second best throw ever (just 20cm less) at age 26. Andrey Skvaruk reached his peak at the latest, at age 35. But at age 27 he was also just 90cm from his ultimate best.

Like Michael Johnson, Sedykh is the complete outlier. While others were merely about to hold their form, Sedykh was one of the rare athletes that making significant gains in his late twenties and early thirties. He added more than five meters to his best between 28 and 31. The next best athlete (Gécsek) improved just two meters after age 27. As my 28th birthday approaches, I am hoping I can also be one of the few to make gains at this stage of my career, even if I don’t have Sedykh’s physical gifts

*Age 35