You would assume athletes who dedicate their lives to keeping fit and healthy would generally live longer lives.
Elite athletes are expected to live longer because people who are fit are less likely to die from cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) and cancer.
Unfortunately, our new research suggests this does not appear to hold true for male elite Australian football and rugby union players.
What we discovered
Our research examined survival and longevity in three groups of male elite Australian athletes: Australian Football League (AFL) players, rugby union national team players (the Wallabies), and summer Olympic athletes in cardio sports without high risk of head injury such as rowing, swimming and triathlon.
Before we dive in, a couple of definitions: survival is state of continuing to live, while longevity is the ability to live a long life beyond the average lifespan of people in the general population.
In our study, Olympians outlived the general population by 3.4 years. In contrast, neither AFL players nor the Wallabies lived significantly longer than the general population.
On average, AFL players lived almost four months longer, while the Wallabies lived about eight months less than the general population.
We also compared athletes who debuted before and after January 1, 1970 to see if survival had improved over time.
As expected, the younger generation had better survival than the older generation. But there were similar improvements in survival in the general population too.
In other words, there were no significant improvements in athlete survival relative to the general population.
These findings are surprising given dozens of previous studies featuring half a million elite athletes indicate elite sportspeople typically outlive the general population by four to seven years.
Content retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/olympic-athletes-live-much-longer-than-average-joes-but-elite-afl-and-rugby-union-players-dont-241781.
