The age stats behind the World titles.
July 22, 2025 by Jesse Weisz in News
A version of this article was initially published in 2021 and has been updated and expanded for 2025.
As we prepare for the 43rd PDGA Professional Disc Golf World Championship next week, many storylines revolve around who will win. Can Kristin Lätt win a third World title or will someone from the rest of the field rise up again like Eveliina Salonen in 2024? Will Isaac Robinson find a way to win his third world title in a row? Can Paul McBeth become 7x with his first win on the season and tie Ken Climo as an 18x Major winner? 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 27.3 years.1
- The average age for an FPO winner is 27.9 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 26.9 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 2025 include Eagle McMahon, Gavin Rathbun, Väinö Mäkelä, Jesse Nieminen, and Albert Tamm. There are no strong contenders in the FPO division who turn 27 in 2025.
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.
For a broader look at age in professional disc golf, here is a chart showing the average age of Elite/Major event winners by season:
This season MPO was on pace to have the lowest average age ES/M winner since 2013, but the past four winners (Aderhold, Hames, Callaway, and Heimburg) brought the average up.
In FPO, the first nine event winners of the 2025 season were ages 28 or older and we were on pace for the oldest average winner since 2006, before a recent string of victories from Silva Saarinen, Eveliina Salonen, and Cadence Burge significantly lowered the average age of 2025 FPO winners. Burge with her win at Des Moines became the second youngest FPO Elite/Major winner since ES competitions began in 2003. The youngest winner is Emily Weatherman, who was 26 days younger than Burge when she won a year prior at the age of 18 years, 3 months, and 9 days, also in Des Moines.
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.
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.
