Last week, Ivana Vuleta and Novak Djokovic achieved fantastic victories: Ivana became the World Long Jump and Outdoor Champion at the World Championships held in Budapest, and Novak won his 39th Masters in Cincinnati in the most dramatic and longest match in history of this tennis tournament, which has been held since 1899. Although they won a handful of medals at the biggest competitions and broke many records, the best Serbian athlete of all time and the best world tennis player of all time have not yet put an end to their careers, even though they are in their fourth decade of life.
photo: ap photo / aaron doster…and Novak Djokovic
"36 is the new 26 and it's a good feeling," said Djokovic at Wimbledon this summer, commenting on his age, and Ivana, after winning the world "gold" at the age of 33, summed up her many years of dedicated work: "This is just a confirmation that experience is my greatest ally. I had no doubt that I was ready for it, I was just waiting for the opportunity for everything to come together."
For such sports feats even in the "late" years of life, several conditions are certainly necessary. First of all, incredible talent, tremendous work, boundless love for the work they do and, no less important, a combination of lucky circumstances. In modern professional sports, all this implies a top professional team.
When it comes to athletics, the history of the "queen of sports" is full of heroines who broke many, not only sports, boundaries. Here are some of them.
The first post-war Olympic Games held in London in 1948 were marked by Fanny Blankers Kuhn, a Dutch athlete who, although the world record holder in the long jump and high jump, won four gold medals in all sprint races because the number of competitive disciplines according to the then Olympic rules was limited. She achieved this greatest success of her career as a mother of two children, at the age of thirty, and that was not the end. She achieved an almost identical result two years later at the European Championship in Brussels. She was 34 years old when she last competed in a major competition – the Helsinki Games in 1952. With four Olympic "golds", five titles of European champion and more than twenty broken world records, the "flying housewife" as she was called, was declared the best female athlete of the 1999th century in 20.
The "queen of the track" Marlin Oti had an even more impressive career. This Jamaican was born in 1960, and she last performed at the age of 52 at the 2012 European Championship held in Helsinki. In more than thirty years of competition, she won almost forty medals; the first Olympic Games in which she performed were those held in Moscow in 1980, and the last in Sydney in 2000, when she took third place in the 4-meter race, and second in the 100×1991 relay, and so, with a total of nine medals, she became the athlete with the most won Olympic medals. She achieved her greatest successes after she turned 1993: at the world championships in 1995, 36, 100, and the following year at the Games in Atlanta, at the age of 200 she won silver medals in the XNUMX and XNUMX meters and "bronze" in the relay and became the most successful athlete of the Games.
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by another great athlete, the American Jackie Joyner Kersey. She competed in the heptathlon and long jump and in each of those disciplines, at the four Olympics in which she participated from 1984 to 1996 (Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta), she won three Olympic medals each, and at the world championships in the same period, four more gold medals, two in each discipline. The last medal won was "bronze" in the long jump at the Games in Atlanta, at the age of 34.
For the last fifteen years, the athletic star has been Shelley-Anne Fraser-Pryce, five-time world sprint champion. This tiny Jamaican (she is 152 cm tall) first became an Olympic champion in the 100 meters at the age of 22 in 2008 at the Beijing Games, and last year, at the age of 36, she won her fifth world gold. By winning another Olympic gold medal in 2012 in London, she became the oldest champion in individual running disciplines. She has a total of ten gold medals from the world championships, but she has not yet finished her athletic story. As the current champion, she also participates in this year's World Championships and shares the athletics stadium in Budapest with our Ivana.
photo: ap photo / matthias schrader...
Although, as she says, she stopped counting medals, Ivana still won many awards with the surname Španović, which ensured her a place in the history of Serbian athletics. Ten years ago, in 2013, she won third place at the World Championships in Moscow, which was the first medal for Serbia at the World Championships. Two years later, she won the European indoor championship, and in 2018 and 2022 the world indoor championship. She achieved her greatest success at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 – a bronze medal and a new national outdoor record (7,08 m). Although she expected a better ranking, Ivana's success at the Olympics is not measured by the color of the medal she won, but by the years she waited for. And it was a long wait! During more than one hundred years of continuous participation in the Olympic Games, only the third medal in athletics was won for our National Olympic Committee in 2016. The first one was won by Ivan Gubijan in London in 1948 in the hammer throw, who won the silver medal, just like the marathoner Franja Mihalić eight years later.
A whole sixty years after that, Ivana Španović stood on the Olympic podium in Rio de Janeiro, winning the "bronze" in the long jump.
By winning the gold medal at the World Outdoor Athletics Championship, Ivana Vuleta stepped into world history. At the age of 33, she won an impressive collection of trophies at the biggest competitions and stood shoulder to shoulder with champions like Marlene Otti, Jackie Joyner and Shelly-Anne. He's in good company!
