Which Athletes Live the Longest? What Mortality Studies Actually Show

Elite athletes often outlive the public. But the sport that appears to add years in one study can look unremarkable in another. The difference is not necessarily a contradiction: sometimes the researchers are measuring different things.

In a study of nearly 20,000 National Football League players, deaths from all causes were 30% lower than expected. Yet deaths from neurodegenerative diseases were almost four times as frequent. Both findings came from the same group of athletes. Neither is a typo.

Now consider a different result. An analysis of 95,210 sporting biographies associated pole vaulting with 8.4 extra years of life, gymnastics with 8.2, and sumo wrestling with 9.8 fewer. Those figures have the irresistible precision of a league table. But are they measuring the effect of playing a sport, the characteristics of people who reach its highest level, or the peculiarities of the records available to researchers?

The answer matters well beyond professional sport. If you want to choose an activity that will help you stay healthy for decades, should you run, swim, play tennis, lift weights or join a football team? The evidence has a fairly clear message about movement. It has a much less certain answer about winners.

Editorial update · 12 October 2026. This article was originally published under Mikhail Faranov, MD (died January 2025). The Mike’s Balance editorial team researched and prepared the 2026 evidence update; Dr Faranov did not write or review these later additions.

Do elite athletes actually live longer?

First, a surprisingly consistent result. A 2014 meta-analysis of 42,807 elite athletes found that deaths occurred at roughly two-thirds the rate expected from the general population. Its pooled standardised mortality ratio, or SMR, was 0.67. Cardiovascular and cancer mortality were also lower. A subsequent systematic review of 54 studies reached broadly similar conclusions. [1] [2]

Then researchers asked a more discriminating question: does the advantage differ by the kind of sport? Runacres and colleagues reviewed the literature and meta-analysed 24 studies encompassing 164,833 former athletes. They again found an overall SMR of 0.67. Among men, the combined estimates were 0.65 for endurance sports, 0.68 for team sports, and 1.04 for power sports. The confidence interval around the power-sport estimate included 1, meaning there was no clear mortality advantage in that subgroup. [3]

These are not three estimates of how many years an individual will gain by signing up for a sport. They compare deaths observed in cohorts of elite athletes with deaths expected from population rates. The review also found enormous variation between studies: overall heterogeneity was I² = 96.9%. Its pooled figure summarises an uneven landscape rather than a single universal effect.

Even within those broad categories, the grouping is awkward. The same label “team sports” can include baseball and American football, whose long-term hazards are not interchangeable. And there is another missing piece: many of the data come from men who competed generations ago. Women were included in the larger meta-analysis, but too few studies allowed reliable sport-by-sport female comparisons. [3]

Why a ranking of 44 sports is so tempting

A much more colourful answer appeared in a study published in GeroScience. Researchers assembled 95,210 athlete records from 183 countries and 44 sporting disciplines, primarily from Wikipedia and Wikidata. They compared recorded ages at death with reference life-expectancy figures adjusted by country, sex and year of death. [4]

For men, pole vaulting was associated with a difference of +8.4 years, gymnastics with +8.2, and sumo wrestling with −9.8. Tennis and badminton also looked favourable, with positive associations in both sexes. Suddenly the question “Which sport wins?” seemed answerable down to a decimal point.

But that precision is misleading if it is read as an estimate of what the sport causes. The database includes athletes notable enough to appear in public biographical records. About 95.5% of records were male. Socioeconomic background, smoking, childhood health and the circumstances that made someone a professional athlete were not adequately controlled. In the male model, sport type accounted for only 6.2% of variation in the study’s lifespan-difference measure (adjusted R² = 0.06216). That describes explanatory power within this selected dataset; it does not mean sport determines 6.2% of an individual’s lifespan. The reference is not a matched non-athlete cohort followed over the same life course; it uses period life-expectancy figures alongside recorded ages at death. Those are very different quantities.

There is another complication. The authors excluded deaths recorded as accidental or unnatural. That choice may be defensible for a particular analysis, but it also means that the result is not simply the average lifespan of everyone who took part in a sport. When a study filters causes of death, its answer necessarily depends on that decision.

So this work is fascinating, especially for generating hypotheses. It is not a reliable league table for parents choosing a child’s sport, or adults choosing their own.

The Finnish test: decades of follow-up

For a firmer historical perspective, look to Finland. Researchers followed 2,363 former male elite athletes and 1,657 controls, using national mortality records, over a median follow-up of about 50 years. [5]

Median life expectancy was 79.1 years for endurance athletes, 78.8 for team-sport athletes, and 72.9 for controls. These are striking differences. The endurance and team-sport groups also showed advantages in several causes of death. The power-sport group did not follow the same reassuring pattern across every outcome, and boxers showed elevated dementia mortality within the power-sport category.

The comparison is more tangible than a generic statement about athlete longevity. It also comes with the usual caution: these are groups with different lives, not randomly assigned people sent to train for decades. Military fitness screening influenced the study population. Both athletes and controls lived through particular historical conditions. An impressive contrast is not identical to a causal estimate.

Still, taken alongside the meta-analyses, the Finnish results help establish something useful: the broad survival advantage of endurance and team-sport athletes is not just an artefact of a single dataset.

The football paradox: fewer deaths, different dangers

The clearest lesson in why a sport cannot be judged by one lifespan figure comes from two forms of football.

A study of 7,620 male professional English footballers born between 1900 and 1972 found 3,571 deaths through 2022, compared with 4,242 expected from population rates. The resulting SMR was 0.84. This cohort had lower overall mortality than the general male population. However, its records came substantially from public databases, and the study was not designed to assign every possible health effect to playing football. [6]

American football produces a more unsettling contrast. In 2026, Luster and colleagues reported on 19,824 NFL players who entered the league between 1960 and 2019. Overall mortality was lower than expected (SMR 0.70). Cardiovascular and cancer mortality were also lower. Yet mortality from neurodegenerative diseases was substantially higher (SMR 3.94); estimates were elevated for dementia, Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The underlying death-certificate records counted 178 neurodegenerative deaths versus 45.21 expected after demographic standardisation. Even after a simulation accounting for competing causes of death, the estimated excess remained approximately threefold. [7]

This does not mean that nearly four in every hundred NFL players will die from a neurodegenerative disorder. An SMR of 3.94 is a relative comparison with expected mortality; it is not an individual probability or an absolute excess of 294 percentage points. The study included 1,994 deaths from all causes across its follow-up, but the specific risk for an individual also depends on age, playing history and many other factors.

There is also a revealing change of comparison group. In a 2019 study, 3,419 NFL players were compared not with the general population, but with 2,708 Major League Baseball players. The NFL group had higher adjusted all-cause mortality (hazard ratio 1.26) and higher neurodegenerative mortality when underlying or contributing causes were counted (HR 2.99). [8]

That comparison does not isolate the independent causal effect of repetitive head impacts. But it weakens the argument that favourable overall mortality proves the sport is harmless. It also demonstrates why the choice of comparison group can transform the apparent answer.

Even a death certificate can undercount neurological disease. In a separate 2026 study of 202 deceased former NFL players who donated their brains and had clinically assessed dementia, only 62 (30.7%) had a neurodegenerative disease listed as the underlying cause of death. Including contributing causes raised that to 82 (40.6%). This was a highly selected brain-donor sample, not a representative sample of all players. Its percentages must not be used to correct the league-wide mortality ratio or to estimate dementia prevalence. They expose another limitation of cause-of-death records. [10]

What the major studies actually found

The following evidence map is designed to make the disagreements visible, not to rank the sports. Each number retains its original metric and comparator. An SMR, a hazard ratio and a difference in recorded years of life cannot be added together or ranked on a common scale.

How much is sport, and how much is selection?

Imagine selecting a thousand people who eventually become elite endurance athletes. Long before the first medal, they may already differ from the general population in health, genetics, education, resources, smoking, diet and access to medical care. Some of those differences will follow them into old age.

That is the healthy-athlete effect. It does not make the mortality studies worthless. It changes the question they can answer. The studies establish that selected groups of athletes survived differently from comparison populations. They generally cannot divide that difference neatly into training, background advantages and post-retirement behaviour.

The 165,000-athlete review includes a telling sensitivity point: in two studies using controls selected for military fitness, rather than the population as a whole, the athlete advantage was not statistically clear. When the comparator becomes more similar to the athletes, part of the apparent difference may shrink. [3]

Other sources of distortion work in different directions. A famous athlete is more likely to appear in a biographical database than a little-known contemporary. Records from different centuries cannot be treated as interchangeable. Different sports also create different injury exposures, body-size distributions and opportunities to remain active after retirement. And studies of people who lived long enough to qualify for an elite cohort have already selected survivors to some extent.

What this means for ordinary exercisers

This is where the literature becomes more directly useful. In 2024, Oja and colleagues reviewed 136 papers from 76 studies involving around 2.6 million adults who participated in recreational sports. Their meta-analyses linked cycling to lower all-cause mortality (HR 0.79), running to lower mortality (HR 0.77) and swimming to lower mortality (HR 0.76). Some sports also showed benefits for cardiovascular fitness, blood pressure or body composition. [9]

These estimates should not be used to declare swimming the winner over running by one percentage point. The underlying cohorts, exposure definitions and uncertainties differ. Nor does observational evidence prove that changing someone’s sport would reproduce the same percentage change in risk.

But the broader picture is much clearer than the elite-athlete league table: several quite different activities are associated with meaningful health benefits. For a person choosing a lifelong habit, enjoyment, accessibility, injury risk and the likelihood of continuing may be more actionable than a ranking drawn from professional sporting history.

There is no reason to conclude from the power-athlete subgroup that strength training is bad for health. That subgroup comprises selected competitive disciplines and historical cohorts, not every person who lifts weights. Likewise, the NFL findings should not be applied indiscriminately to all team games. Specific exposures matter.

If the purpose is health rather than a professional career, a sustainable combination of aerobic movement, muscular strength, recovery and appropriate medical care is a more defensible goal than trying to reproduce an Olympian’s training load. This is a practical synthesis of the wider evidence, not a regimen tested by the athlete-mortality cohorts themselves.

So which athletes live longest?

If the question is which broad elite-athlete groups most consistently outlive the general population, the answer remains endurance and team-sport athletes. If the question is which specific sport adds the most years, no convincing causal podium exists. The eye-catching numbers for pole vaulting, gymnastics and sumo are intriguing, but the method cannot establish the effect of choosing one sport rather than another.

And if you are choosing an activity for yourself, the strongest lesson may be the one professional-sport rankings cannot give you. Running, cycling and swimming are all associated with lower mortality in recreational populations. No medals are required.

A statistic can tell us that athletes tend to live longer. Another can tell us that some of those same athletes face a particular danger. Both may be true. A long life, a healthy life and a low risk of every disease are three different outcomes. The best sports science keeps them separate.

References and methodology

Editorial approach: This is a critical narrative synthesis of published reviews and observational cohorts, not a new meta-analysis. It preserves each source’s original denominator, comparator and outcome rather than pooling incomparable results. The two editorial plots use only published summary statistics: the NFL chart plots SMRs 0.70 and 3.94 on a common 0–4× scale (178 / 45.21 = 3.94 for neurodegenerative deaths); the Finnish chart plots reported medians and 95% confidence intervals on a labelled, truncated 70–82-year scale. No new individual-level data were analysed. Figures were checked against the linked publications as of October 2026; numerical contrasts across studies should not be interpreted causally.

1. Garatachea N et al. (2014). Elite athletes live longer than the general population: a meta-analysis. Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 42,807 athletes.
2. Lemez S, Baker J (2015). Do Elite Athletes Live Longer? A Systematic Review of Mortality and Longevity in Elite Athletes.
3. Runacres A, Mackintosh KA, McNarry MA (2021). Health Consequences of an Elite Sporting Career: Long-Term Detriment or Long-Term Gain? Sports Medicine. Meta-analysis covering 164,833 athletes.
4. Sport and longevity: an observational study of international athletes (2024). GeroScience. 95,210 biographical records.
5. Kettunen JA et al. (2015). All-cause and disease-specific mortality among male, former elite athletes: an average 50-year follow-up. British Journal of Sports Medicine.
6. Sellers M et al. (2026, online 2025). Professional male English footballers of the 20th century had lower death rates than the general population. Science and Medicine in Football.
7. Luster CB et al. (2026). Neurodegenerative mortality among National Football League Players. EClinicalMedicine.
8. Nguyen VT et al. (2019). Mortality Among Professional American-Style Football Players and Professional American Baseball Players. JAMA Network Open.
9. Oja P et al. (2024). Health Benefits of Different Sports: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal and Intervention Studies Including 2.6 Million Adult Participants. Sports Medicine – Open.
10. Luster CB et al. (2026). Neurodegenerative Disease Death Certification Among National Football League Players With Dementia. JAMA Network Open. Selected brain-donor sample, n = 202; article corrected on 29 September 2026.