A new frontier: Serena Williams is back on court at 44

When Serena Williams walks onto the lawns of Wimbledon on Tuesday she will do so at the age of 44. Later in the tournament, in their first doubles match together in four years, she will be joined by sister Venus, 46. Between them they hold 12 Wimbledon singles and six doubles titles, but their return to SW19 in their mid-40s would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago.

It is the latest example of a growing trend in sport: athletes are getting older. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar only two of the 32 squads had an average age of 28 or higher. In this year’s competition that applies to more than half of the 48 teams. Before this year only seven players in their 40s had ever appeared in a World Cup game. In this tournament alone six have done so already.

It won’t be long before sportspeople are competing into their 50s as the science continues to advance, said Dr Ralph Rogers, an expert in regenerative medicine who was the first team doctor at Chelsea FC for more than a decade. “Now we know about sleep optimisation. We know about nutrition, we know about hydration, recovery patterns are different.”

Perhaps the biggest shift is in how athletes view recovery. Post-match cryotherapy chambers, compression therapy, infrared saunas and personalised physiotherapy programmes are now standard features of elite sport. At Wimbledon, the Williams sisters will use the recovery room: a roughly 10mx5m room attached to the players’ indoor gym where they can receive red light therapy, pulsed electromagnetic fields and hydrogen inhalation therapy to aid recovery. Players often also sit in leg recovery sleeves, which are either hot or cold, to help stimulate muscle repair.

These are treatments on offer to all competitors, including those at the beginning of their careers. Because of that, there is every possibility that today’s young sportspeople could keep playing past 50.

The question hanging over Serena Williams will be the impact of GLP-1s on her performance. She became the most prominent example of an athlete using weight loss drugs after she lost 34lbs in one year, last year, and became the face of Ro, a GLP-1 online pharmacy of which her husband is on the board.

GLP-1s can also reduce inflammation in the body, which is key to recovery, and the drugs are being monitored by doping authorities to determine whether they should be considered a performance-enhancing drug.

Rogers does not believe GLP-1s are the reason for Serena’s return. “She’s able to come back because she’s determined… there is just a mental strength that’s incredible,” he said. “Not any old 40-year-old is going to come back. Let me tell you something, I think she can go for another three to four years.”

Additional reporting by Bill Edgar

Photograph by Matthias Hangst/Getty Images