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If there is no correlation to age equaling prime, how do we determine when an athlete is in their prime? When they won the most? It can’t be the mileage, because it’s not like DC wasn’t training his ass off his entire life dealing with injuries and more. So it must be when they win the most...
I’ll tell you when Fedor won the most...when he wasn’t drug tested. Then his ass gets handed to him three times in a row, he flees America back to no testing land, and rattles off what...5 in a row? And then comes back to America and is staring at the lights again?
So maybe it’s not just wins and losses...maybe athletic prime is when an athlete’s testosterone levels are the highest. In Fedor’s case, as we can track his career’s decline, we can assume that was in a land where testing didn’t occur. (Correlation, not causation)
Now I’m not implying that an athlete hailing from a country that is currently embroiled in the largest state-sponsored international steroid scandal ever was a cheat, I have no proof of that whatsoever, I’m just pointing out that said athlete had greater success when testing wasn’t applied and their performance suffered greatly when they were under constant scrutiny.
But of course prime isn’t determined by age...I’m agreeing with you...it’s determined by the athletes performance, and the athlete who has always been under IOC or USADA scrutiny has continued to perform at a high level into their late 30s, while the other has only performed at high levels when not under that same scrutiny, regardless of their chronological age.
