Unlimited Youth

© Susana Girón

Every year, thousands of Master athletes take part in official competitions around the world, getting to be one of the most crowded sporting events in the world. In these competitions, the categories to compete change every 5 years so that they are more balanced. Thus, starting at the age of 35, categories are established up to sometimes reaching +100 years ...

The 2018 World Masters Athletics saw more than 8200 athletes from 101 different nationalities take part in the official competitions. 25% of these athletes were older than 65 years old. The oldest ones, the Italian Giuseppe Ottaviani 102 years-old or the Indian woman Man Kaur 101 years-old, were the most extraordinary cases within a fascinating group of people that keep training and competing during the third age.

The great majority began training at the age of 40 or 50 seeking a healthy lifestyle. But now, beyond the marks or records, competition is also an opportunity for traveling, making friends, keeping the illusion for life and getting older in a much healthier way.

They are just a group of older people, that run fast, throw really far and jump incredibly high, but far from that, they are an example for society, where values like effort, passion, determination or will, not only belong to sport values but very much to human values too. Promoting what they do, on the one hand, will make people realize how inspirational these athletes are and secondly should give more value to the elderly in society, an age group often undervalued.

Apart from the amazing scenes of these athletes jumping or running, photographer Susana Giron combined the reportage photographs with staged portraits of the athletes after taking part on the different competitions, asking to the athletes to handwrite a sentence or two some advice for younger people!!!

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