Average Age of Olympians by Sport and Gender, Paris 2024

Key figures

Equestrian has the oldest field at Paris 2024, with mean ages of 37.8 for women and 40.5 for men. It also has the oldest athlete on the chart, a woman aged 69.
Skateboarding has the youngest women, with a mean age of 17.9, and the youngest athlete on the chart, aged 12.
Most disciplines have mean ages between about 23 and 30 for both women and men.
In men’s football the mean age is 22.7, the lowest men’s figure on the chart, against 26.9 for women.
Artistic swimming and rhythmic gymnastics show women only.

All figures are from the graphic. It does not print a data source; the creator’s project page says the data comes from a Kaggle dataset of Paris 2024 athletes [1].

Mean age of Olympians by discipline and gender, in text

Title: Age Distribution of 11,110 Olympians Across 42 Disciplines by Gender, Paris 2024. The chart is a beeswarm plot: each dot is one athlete placed by age on an axis labelled “Age in Years” (10 to 70), red for women and navy for men. The table below gives the mean ages printed in the right-hand column, in the graphic’s order from top to bottom.

Discipline	Mean age, women	Mean age, men
Equestrian	37.8	40.5
Triathlon	29.3	28.7
Table Tennis	29.1	28.6
Tennis	28.5	30.2
Handball	28.5	29.5
Shooting	28.4	31.1
Golf	28.4	30.9
Basketball	28.2	29.1
Rowing	28	28
Volleyball	27.9	29.8
Canoe Slalom	27.7	29.3
Sailing	27.6	28.7
Fencing	27.4	28.1
Judo	27.2	27.4
Canoe Sprint	27	28
Cycling	26.9	27.5
Badminton	26.9	27.7
Rugby Sevens	26.7	26.9
Athletics	27.4	26.7
Water Polo	26.5	28.1
Modern Pentathlon	27.5	26.5
Hockey	26.5	28.3
Breaking	26.5	27.7
Weightlifting	26.4	27
Wrestling	26.2	28.2
Boxing	27.4	25.7
Marathon Swimming	25.6	25.1
Cycling BMX Racing	24.8	26.4
Taekwondo	24.7	24.7
Archery	24.7	26.3
Trampoline Gymnastics	25.6	24
Surfing	23.8	27.9
Diving	23.8	24.7
Cycling BMX Freestyle	23.8	25.8
Marathon Swimming, Swimming	23.3	23.4
Artistic Swimming	23.3	no men listed
Sport Climbing	23.2	24.5
Football	26.9	22.7
Swimming	22.4	23.5
Artistic Gymnastics	22	26
Rhythmic Gymnastics	20.4	no men listed
Skateboarding	17.9	25.9

Callouts on the chart: “Oldest: 69” (a woman in equestrian); “Max. relative difference : +108%” (a woman in table tennis aged about 61); “Min. relative difference : -48%” (a man in shooting aged about 16); “Youngest : 12” (a woman in skateboarding). Footer: X handle PietroViolo and the Université de Montréal logo. The Paris 2024 emblem sits in the top left corner.

Average age of Olympians across the disciplines

The chart does not give one overall average. Read across the table, women’s means run from 17.9 in skateboarding to 37.8 in equestrian, and men’s from 22.7 in football to 40.5 in equestrian. Of the 40 disciplines with both columns filled, men are older on average in 30, women are older in 8 (including athletics, boxing, football and triathlon), and the two are level in rowing and taekwondo (our count from the table).

Some patterns follow from the rules of each sport. Men’s teams in the Paris 2024 football tournament were restricted to under 23 players, with up to three older players allowed, while women’s teams had no age limit [4]. That explains the cluster of navy dots around 18 to 23 and the low men’s mean. Sports that reward experience and fine control, such as equestrian, shooting and table tennis, have long tails into the 50s and 60s.

A separate analysis of the same Kaggle athlete data by Yennie Jun found that 60% of the 20 youngest athletes at Paris 2024 competed in skateboarding and 80% of the 20 oldest in equestrian events [2]. She names China’s Zheng Haohao, a skateboarder, as the youngest athlete and Australia’s Mary Hanna, an equestrian rider aged 69, as the oldest [2].

Notes on this infographic

Youngest age. The chart labels the youngest athlete as 12. Yennie Jun’s analysis of the same data gives 11 for Zheng Haohao [2]; the difference is probably how age was calculated (by birth year or by date).
Relative difference. The graphic does not explain the “+108%” and “-48%” callouts. They appear to compare one athlete’s age with the mean of their discipline.
Row labels. “Cycling” covers the cycling disciplines not listed separately, and “Marathon Swimming, Swimming” is a row for athletes entered in both, as printed.
Data date. Athletes entered for Paris 2024 (26 July to 11 August 2024).

Questions about the average age of Olympians

What is the average age of Olympic athletes?

At Paris 2024 it depended on the sport. On this chart most disciplines have mean ages between about 23 and 30, ranging from 17.9 for women in skateboarding to 40.5 for men in equestrian.

Who is the youngest Olympian of all time?

Olympedia lists Dimitrios Loundras of Greece, who competed in gymnastics at Athens in 1896 aged 10 years and 216 days, as the youngest Olympic competitor on record [3].