Athletes Are 12,000 Strong at Senior Games

At 63, Jeanne Hoagland breaks records and shatters myths. When she retired from teaching last year, the Los Angeles resident asked her third-graders what they thought she should do next. Rest home, one youngster said. A baby-sitting job, suggested another.

Forget that.

Trim and tanned, Hoagland recently has set three national age-group records in track and field, including one for running the mile in 6 minutes, 33 seconds. “But you know what’s more important than the competition?” she asked, barely puffing after breezing to victory in the 1500 meters Friday at the 1999 National Senior Games, often called the Senior Olympics.

“I come to model what can be done when you’re fit. In other words, here’s what’s left!”

There are more than 12,000 models here at Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex, using a 10-day competition in 18 different sports to show what’s left among athletes ranging in age from 50-year-old baby boomers to a 99-year-old archer.

“I may not do good but I’m a competitor,” said John Pino, a Pueblo Indian from Old Laguna, N.M., who was born with the century.

Staged every two years, this festival of gray-haired athleticism has grown fivefold since it began in 1987 and now represents the largest sports competition in the world--bigger even than the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where 10,000 athletes took part. Competitors come from all 50 states, with Florida, California, Maryland and Texas each sending delegations of more than 550.

“We are witnessing the changing image of aging and the growing health- and fitness-focused lifestyle of mature adults,” said David F. Hull Jr., president and CEO of the National Senior Games Assn.

Indeed, if there is a theme here, repeated over and over by everyone from horseshoe tossers to pole vaulters, it is a variation of the credo voiced by Vicky Cruz, 53, a maintenance worker at UC Berkeley and the left fielder for the East Bay Sticks softball team: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

“I hadn’t played basketball for 40 years,” said Betty Burns, 60, point guard on the Oklahoma Classics II three-on-three team, which rolled to the championship in the 55-59 age division. “But I had major cancer surgery in 1985 and the doctor told me to exercise. My husband is so afraid that I’ll get hurt that he won’t watch us play. He says: ‘When are you going to quit?’ And I tell him: ‘When I have to.’ ”

As the nation ages, notions about what is age-appropriate are undergoing fundamental changes, according to demographers. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 34.5 million Americans are now 65 or older and many now believe that putting a shot or swimming the 100-meter butterfly is as possible and as much fun as canasta.

“It’s just fun being an athlete again,” said Lloyd Kempf, 65, who traveled here with his wife, Audrey, 60, from Woonsocket, S.D., so both could take part in several track and field events. “I love this. It’s the only good thing I’ve found about growing old.”

Old, of course, is relative and perhaps a state of mind. With age, reflexes slow, muscles can grow weaker and bursts of energy are less explosive. But in these games, which end next Friday, there is plenty of passion and gutsy effort on display.

“This has changed my life,” said Flo Meiler, a 65-year-old grandmother from Shelburne, Vt., who took up track and field just five years ago and has a personal best in the pole vault of 5 feet, 3 inches. “I spend a lot less time worrying about family problems.”

Of the 18 events contested here, some seem less athletic than others--horseshoes, bowling, golf and shuffleboard, for example.

But there are 70-year-old pole vaulters here, racquetball and table tennis competitors in their 80s and a few contestants in singles badminton who are over 90. The largest group of participants--43%--are in their 60s.

Many of those taking part in the Senior Games are lifelong athletes, active since school days.

But many others, especially women who were in school long before the federal law Title IX opened up competitive sports to females in the early 1970s, are competing for the first time. “I’m a Depression-era person and we weren’t allowed to do any of the fun stuff in school,” said runner Janet Freeman, 67, of Napoleon, Ohio. “Then it was marriage, children and work. I started this in 1981 and I’m going to keep going.”