Ten years ago, a cultural phenomenon swept the United States. This was “Linsanity,” the mass hype surrounding a Harvard basketball player, who, after going undrafted in 2010, would become one of the biggest stars of the sport barely a year later. Two years after that, nobody save for the most diehard basketball fans would even know what team he played on. Meanwhile, in tennis, there is Roger Federer, who, at 40, is still one of the juggernauts of tennis. Perhaps even look at Kevin Harvick, the 45-year-old NASCAR driver who led the series last year with nine wins (a quarter of the schedule).
One could point to a number of reasons why Jeremy Lin fizzled out so young or how Harvick seems to have discovered the fountain of youth, but what we find more interesting is to look at each sport as a whole. We want to determine what the “peak age” is in three different sports. Peak age can be defined as the age at which players, on average, have the most success based on each sport’s individual measurement criteria. Do basketball players tend to simply fizzle out younger? Do NASCAR drivers perform better with a little gray in their beards? Let’s dig in.