The age stats behind the World titles.
August 19, 2024 by Jesse Weisz in News with 0 comments
A version of this article was initially published in 2021 and has been updated and expanded for 2024.
As we prepare for the 42nd PDGA Professional Disc Golf World Championship next week, many storylines revolve around who will win. Does Kristin Tattar have a third World title on her wedding registry or is the field going to rise up and challenge her? Will a new generation of players take it down like Isaac Robinson did in 2023? Can Paul McBeth become 7x with his first win on the season? Can Ricky Wysocki win his first major since 2017?
This article will examine the ages at which past champions took down the most prestigious Major in our sport. Before reading any further, try to guess the average age of a world champion. How about their age when they first won a world championship?
Player ages in these graphs represent the age they turned at some point in the calendar year they won Worlds, before or after the tournament.
This graph shows the age of the MPO winner each year:
This graph shows the age of the FPO winner each year:
This violin plot shows the distribution of the winners by age:
This graph shows only first-time MPO winners:
This graph shows only first-time FPO winners:
A few statistics:
- The oldest MPO winner was Ken Climo (38) in 2006.
- The oldest FPO winner was Beth Tanner (40) in 1996.
- The youngest MPO winner was Sam Ferrans (16) in 1984, but he turned 17 that same year, which is how age is tracked in this article due to not having exact birth dates for most of the pros.
- The youngest FPO winner was Paige Pierce (20) in 2011. Marie Jackson Elsner was also 20 when she won her first Worlds, but she was two months older than Pierce at the time of her victory.
- The average age for an MPO winner is 27.4 years.1
- The average age for an FPO winner is 28 years.2
- The average age for a first-time MPO winner is 27.3 years.3
- The average age for a first-time FPO winner is 27.1 years.4
The average age for winners in both divisions — along with first-time MPO and FPO winners — is between 27 and 28. Players that will turn 27 in 2024 include Mason Ford, Ezra Aderhold, Aaron Gossage, and Maria Oliva. Players that turn 28 in 2024 include Calvin Heimburg, Kevin Jones, Andrew Marwede, Ella Hansen, Anniken Steen, Rebecca Cox, Sai Ananda, and 2018 World Champion Paige Shue.
Despite this age being the average, it has actually been a while since a player of exactly 27 or 28 has won. The last time a 27 year-old won Worlds in MPO was Cam Todd in 2001, the last 28 year-old winner was Ken Climo in 1996, the last 27 year-old FPO winner was Juliana Korver in 1998, and the last 28 year-old winner was Paige Pierce in 2019.
The median first-time winner for MPO players is 28, and the median first-time FPO player is 27. This shows that you are just as likely to win before the ages of 27/28 as after them.
Another way to think about it: one-time winners tended to win their Worlds later than multi-time winners captured their first title. That makes sense if you figure that multi-time winners like Ken Climo, Nate Doss, Paul McBeth, Ricky Wysocki, Val Jenkins, and Paige Pierce may have more natural talent, so they don’t have to wait until their peak (late 20s – early 30s) to win, whereas a one-time winner might. Other players would have likely won earlier in their careers had they started playing earlier, such as Barry Schultz, Juliana Korver, Des Reading, Catrina Allen, and Kristin Tattar.
There have been 41 MPO PDGA World Championships, and Ken Climo has won 12 of them. That could have distorted the average age, but even if we remove Climo from the data set, the average age from MPO World Champions is 27.1.
If we look at Elite and Major winners thus far in 2024, the average age for an MPO winner is 25, whereas the average age for an FPO winner is 30.6. Just like 2023, this MPO season has felt like a continuing changing of the guards, with 12 of the 21 season winners being age 24 or younger. For FPO, it has been a different story, with players aged 30 or older winning 14 of the 22 events.
Here is a chart showing the average age of Elite/Major event winners by season:
This season MPO is currently on pace to be the lowest average age ES/M winner since 2014, when a young 24-year old Paul McBeth won half of the events.
What is the prime age in other sports?:
- As of July 2018, the average age for a Major winner in men’s golf is 32 years and 143 days. In fact, the winners for each of the four majors have an average age of 32.
- As of May 2018, the average age for a men’s tennis Grand Slam winner is 24 years and 350 days. (The average age must have gone up since then with the dominance of Djokovic and Nadal, winning 17 of the 21 grand slam titles since May 2018 while in their 30s).
- On average, NASCAR drivers perform the best when they are 39 years old.5
- As of November 2021, the average age of an NBA All-Star player and an MVP is 26.5 and 27.9, respectively.
- Similar statistics for women’s sports are unfortunately not readily available without primary data analysis.
My thanks to StatMando for their input on this piece. If you would like to learn more about the age trajectories of the top players in the history of disc golf, please check out this article I wrote a few years ago.
