Philip Rivers and Lindsey Vonn’s middle-age comebacks are defying age. One of baseball’s modern marvels details what it takes

By CNN Newsource

Published December 21, 2025 3:00 AM

By Hannah Keyser, CNN

(CNN) — Jamie Moyer is back in his hometown of Souderton, Pennsylvania, for his father’s 95th birthday party. He says it was a smashing success, filled with people from Jim Moyer’s near-century in the Philadelphia suburb.

So, maybe, the secret to his son’s longevity – and other professional athletes with similarly incredible staying power – is just really great genetics.

Lately, sports fans have been abuzz with the news of practically geriatric, at least by athletic standards, comebacks. Lindsey Vonn won a World Cup race after coming out of retirement at 41, only to be topped in terms of sensational headlines by 44-year-old Philip Rivers serving as the Indianapolis Colts quarterback nearly five years after taking his last NFL snap.

Stories about middle-aged athletes are captivating. To layperson members of a similar age cohort, they straddle a tantalizing paradox of relatability and ultimate physical otherness. Their grey hairs and perhaps softer physiques, things that many of us will be forced to reckon with over time, are juxtaposed with an athleticism that seems superhuman to someone acutely aware of how much even just sleeping wrong can hurt after a certain age.

Actually, it turns out, that stuff plagues the 40-something pros as well.

“It’s the traveling, the hours you keep when you’re traveling. It’s the eating and sleeping in different beds and waking up with a crick in your neck or a stiff back or whatever it might be because you had a bad night of sleep, or half the night you were sleeping on a plane before you got to a hotel,” Moyer told CNN Sports. “As you get older, your body doesn’t accept that as well.”

Moyer, an affable southpaw who didn’t throw very hard – or even especially deceptively – but managed a 25-year big-league career, holds the distinction of being the oldest pitcher to record a win in Major League Baseball. It was, naturally, in his last season, when he made 10 starts for the Colorado Rockies in 2012 at 49 years old.

Satchel Paige, whose Hall-of-Fame career spanned the Negro Leagues and Major League Baseball, is generally recognized as the oldest pitcher ever in baseball for his three shutout innings thrown as a 58-year-old in 1965. But Moyer’s understated productivity into his late 40s is essentially unprecedented and unreplicated.

A certain level of defiance

Perhaps even more remarkable than that age number is that Moyer missed the preceding season while recovering from double surgery to repair his flexor pronator and his ulnar collateral ligament.

Moyer remembers when, after his age 47 season, he met with the doctor who would give a second opinion about his injuries.

“‘I can fix both of these, you’re not going to play anymore, you’re 47 years old,’” Moyer remembers the doctor saying. “He kept going and I just kind of let him talk. And he got done, and I looked at him, and I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna try to play again.’”

He asked the doctor if there was anything, medically, preventing him from going through the rehab process and returning to the field.

“No, but people your age don’t do this,” Moyer says the doctor told him.

Vonn faced a similar incredulity when she made it clear she was planning a comeback less than a year after a knee replacement surgery. In her case, the concern trolling seemed to come largely from fans and bystanders, who questioned the safety of skiing competitively after 40 and on a repaired knee.

“My doctors have cleared me. They are very confident in what I’m doing. I wouldn’t be doing it if it was a reckless idea,” Vonn said in an interview with Eurosport.

Since Moyer retired 13 years ago, there have only been two pitchers to throw even an inning of big-league ball at the age of 45 or older. He was the oldest pitcher in baseball for the final five seasons of his career, including 2008 when he was nearly twice the age of his rotation mates on the eventual World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies.

Amid the hazy, champagney celebration that followed their clinching victory, reporters asked Moyer if he was planning to retire. Would he want to go out on top, already the elder statesmen in the game and now with a ring to cap his then-two decade career? In fact, they phrased it a little more bluntly: You’re retiring now, right?

“My answer immediately was, ‘No, I’m not retiring. Why would I retire?’” Moyer said.

When recently retired players – once his teammates and now coaches or other ambassadors of the game – saw him in the clubhouse, he remembers they would implore from the other side: Keep playing, make them tear your uniform off your back. He didn’t want to miss baseball before he had to. And, besides, he was still effective.

“If I recall, I’m over 60 now so I’m allowed to forget things,” Moyer says, “but I think I won 16 games that year.”

He did. In 2008, 45-year-old Moyer was 16-7 with a 3.71 ERA. The underlying metrics — the kinds of things modern front offices value — weren’t exactly eye-popping, but they never had been.

“I look back over my career, and I felt like I played with and against a lot of players that were way better than me,” Moyer said.

And yet his career outlasted nearly all of theirs.

Adjusting to age

His “stuff,” as they say, wasn’t what made him successful.

He was consistent, persistent, he adjusted his training routine to accommodate how age makes it harder to bounce back. He threw less in between starts; in his 40s he ran on an underwater treadmill while submerged up to his shoulders for conditioning work that was less likely to strain his feet, knees and back.

But mostly, he credits having the time and opportunity to hone the mental side of his game.

“I was fortunate enough to hang around long enough,” Moyer said. “And then have the opportunity to spend time with Harvey Dorfman in person, and read his book, and it really allowed me to step back and reevaluate the mental part of my game and the mental part of my craft.

“And from upon meeting Harvey, from then on, for the remainder of my career, I worked at it, and I worked hard at it. And I really believe that’s another big part of which allowed me to be able to continue to play into my 40s and still be effective.”

Dorfman was a seminal figure in the sports psychology and mental skills field. He wrote “The Mental Game of Baseball”, and later “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching,” and worked for teams and agencies but also with individual players, like Moyer, who dedicated his memoir to Dorfman.

Now, Moyer – who made his first and only All-Star team at 40 – muses that left-handed pitchers in particular mature later (“we’re oddballs to begin with,” he says of the general southpaw reputation). Baseball is getting younger all the time. Moyer thinks the modern athlete is actually too fit to be durable.

He remembers the ‘80s when big league pitchers looked more like beer league dads and pitched with knee braces to support their heavier bodies, but threw 200 innings a season into their 40s. The current iteration of the game is younger, leaner, and more impatient.

But, perhaps, if teams were willing to hang on to those guys a little longer, “I think they’d be able to figure out that, you know what, this guy still has some value to us.”

And the game, certainly, still has value to them. In Philly, where Moyer arrived as a 43-year-old, his teammates razzed him constantly. It irked him at first, but then he grew to appreciate his role as a father figure. And, indeed, the eldest of Moyer’s eight children were closer in age to his teammates than he was. And that was a major motivating factor for him to keep playing.

“My second son, Hutton. He took a liking to Shane Victorino, and Shane took a liking to him,” Moyer says. “And if I could not find my son, all I had to do was look in Shane’s locker, and my son would be sitting in Shane’s locker, facing outward. And Shane would be sitting in the chair talking to him. And I’m like, how cool is that?”

In the time he was away from the NFL, Rivers, who initially retired in January 2021, has become a grandfather, a high school football coach, and packed on a few pounds. “I’m not sure,” Rivers said when he was asked about his current weight before his first start back. “Not what it was when I walked off the field in Buffalo.”

Despite looking a little softer, and a little slower, on the field, Rivers got choked up after his first game back with the Colts last weekend thinking about all the young people in his life he hopes to inspire.

For many athletes, playing until their kids can watch them is an important goal. Playing until your kids are old enough to truly appreciate the experience is a far rarer milestone. And while his kids inspired him to keep going, Moyer was doing the same for non-professional athletes around the tri-state area.

“I was surprised,” he says, “at how many people away from the ballpark, just people outside who may have been fans, or they might be weekend warriors and doing their own sports, or whatever it might be, how many times people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, keep going. You are a great motivation for me or us in our 40s.’”