“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Neil Young
Or is it? I remember a time when all rock stars, Young included, were, well, young. And then the music industry discovered irony, and we realised it was no more ridiculous for Jagger to perform Satisfaction at 55 than 25.
I don’t know if the deft through-ball with which Ryan Giggs, then aged 39 years and 363 days, played in Nani for Manchester United’s fifth goal at Leverkusen last Wednesday could be described as ironic, but the United midfielder seems every bit as intent on prolonging his career as far as possible into his fifth decade as many contemporary rockers.
And quite a few contemporary athletes. Internazionale and Argentina legend Javier Zanetti, who is actually three months older than Giggs, returned to action recently after a six-month absence with a ruptured Achilles tendon. And I can well remember the United States swimmer Dara Torres, then 41, talking animatedly in Beijing in 2008 about returning to elite competition after giving birth. This after adding another silver medal to her extensive Olympic collection. Torres failed narrowly to qualify once again for the US national team for London 2012.
In truth, though, veteran athletes are nothing new: the oldest Olympic gold medallist, Sweden’s Oscar Swahn, was 64 when he won his third and last Olympic gold medal – 101 years ago.
Giggs is not even the oldest player still active in the Barclays Premier League: Brad Friedel of Tottenham Hotspur is 42.
Today’s top sports performers, moreover, benefit from far better medical science than their counterparts even 20 years ago.
And of course it must be easier to keep those old legs going if you are earning better money than all but the most conspicuously successful investment bankers or corporate CEOs.
Why, then, does the continuing presence of Giggs’s name on one of the world’s most closely-monitored team-sheets provoke quite such awe?
The first thing is that football, though less gruelling than, say, the Tour de France bicycle race and less punishing than professional boxing, is well up there in the league of physically demanding sports.
Most athletes who have continued to excel until an advanced age through the years have fallen into one of three categories.
Either a partner/machine does much of the physical hard labour associated with their discipline. (This would apply to equestrian athletes such as Lester Piggott and Hiroshi Hoketsu, the Japanese dressage rider who competed at London 2012, aged 70.)
Or extreme physical fitness is not high on the list of attributes required to perform at a high level (This would apply to Fred Davis, who made his last appearance in the world snooker championship at the age of 70, Viktor Korchnoi, candidate for the world chess championship for the final time at 60, and Swahn, the aged Olympian, whose speciality was a shooting event called running deer.)
Or the athletes in question fulfil less physically demanding roles within sports that are generally physically demanding. (This would apply to football goalkeepers such as Spurs’s Friedel or Peter Shilton, who played his last Football League match at 47.)
Holding down a midfield slot in the first team of one of the two or three best-known football clubs in the world is not covered by any of these, and suggests a fitness level exceptional in a 40-year-old. Even more exceptional is Giggs’s vision and understanding of the game, which are plainly still developing and which his fitness has enabled him to keep on display long after most footballers have been reduced to spectators.
The other quality that has set Giggs apart from most of his peers is flexibility: as the years have gone by he has seemingly been able to remodel his game so as to keep playing to his evolving strengths.
He started out as a left-winger of sublime natural ability, “The most natural player I’ve had,” according to Sir Alex Ferguson, his long-time manager at Manchester United. “If you saw Ryan Giggs at 13, you saw someone float across the ground like a bit of silver paper in the wind.”
In this way, his path as a player is reminiscent of a boyhood hero of mine – Ian Callaghan, a right-winger turned midfielder in the 1960s and 70s, who spent the majority of his career with United’s arch-rivals Liverpool.
Both men enjoyed great success, although no-one can match Giggs in the silverware stakes. The United man has even now overhauled Callaghan for longevity, racking up more than 950 United appearances, versus 948 for English league clubs for the Liverpool idol, who retired at 39.
One man even Giggs will do well to emulate is Sir Stanley Matthews, another winger, “the wizard of the dribble”, who played his last league match for Stoke City in 1965, five days after his 50th birthday.
I am not old enough to remember whether Matthews too adapted his style of play in later years, although he played in an era when there was less off-the-ball running and therefore more space.
Matthews played fewer club games than either Giggs or Callaghan, partly because of the second world war and partly because he appeared in just two competitions, the league and the FA Cup
His longevity, though, is all the more astounding as he would have got less protection from referees than the pampered greyhounds of today.
It is also worth bearing in mind that no substitutes were permitted in the Football League until the season after Matthews finally called it a day. Once selected, that was it for the full 90 minutes.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.