“I try to be an inspiration,” Walter Lancaster said at New York Times. “A lot of people, you know, get lazy or something. And I say: ‘Look. You got to keep moving.’ That’s the secret. Just keep moving.”
I challenge anyone 30 years ago to say that we would have ever heard a sentence like that from a person over 80. We would have thought something ridiculous, that that is not sport and that these people were poor people who were ridiculing themselves. Today, however, not only is this happening more and more often but they can be an inspiration to anyone, whatever their age. For young people who are increasingly sedentary and for adults who think that not only sports but simply moving is not for them. We live in years when 80% of adults suffer from back pain, which for them becomes the main reason for not moving.
In Italy we have 20 percent and 16 percent of over60 men and women who participate in sports. They should be our source of inspiration. Instead, they never appear in newspapers and on social media. They should be the focus of wellness practitioners, of psychologists who should study their psychology, and of physiologists and biomechanists who should instead thoroughly understand the reactions of their physiques.
It would also need to be understood whether these athletes are the same as those represented in the earlier age categories. For example, within the 30 percent of men and 21 percent of women practitioners in the 35-44 age group how many of them still play sports among the over60s? How many among the over60s have been active as sportsmen for a few years? It is probably due to my ignorance that I do not know these data, but they are certainly not widespread among those who work in sports.
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