Seniors give themselves a sporting chance

Australian Financial Review – RETIREMENT LIVING – Special Report

Age is not a barrier to getting involved in activities such as tennis and cycling or bowls, finds Miriam Hechtman.

Getting older may affect your choice of sport but, as many retirees are discovering, participating in a new sport can be equally rewarding. Age as such is not a barrier to getting involved in sport.
“Getting active in organised sport and physical activity should be a lifelong pursuit. It’s never too late to give sport a go,” says Brent Espeland, general manager, sport performance development, at the Australian Sports Commission.

Roger Hansen, administration officer with the Australian Retired Persons Association (SA), says: “If you pick up any of the newspapers and things, as soon as you see something for older people you’ll see funeral notices, cancer notices, taking care of your health, incontinence notices. “But most older people are not in that situation. Most of them are just active and busy and doing their own thing. So I think people are misinformed about what older people do sometimes. We’re not all old and decrepit. We’re a pretty active bunch of people generally.”

The association helps its members participate in physical, social, educational and service activities. Anyone over 50 can join, although the majority of the association’s 4000 members are over 60. “Our biggest group is the bushwalking group and they would have over 400 in their group and that’s quite a large group. They’re very active,” says Hansen. If there has been any increase, it’s probably in the tennis groups, he says.

Geoff Parkinson, 68, from Glenelg in South Australia, has been a member for 10 years. He says he joined the association “largely to find other activities”. He plays tennis and goes bushwalking.
“They are both things that people our age can participate in without any real problem. You can play tennis at the level that suits you at the particular time.” For many retirees, the adjustment from a bustling office to a non-working life can be challenging, especially in terms of social interaction. “That’s one of the important things, of course,” says Parkinson, “establishing a social network that you lose when you stop work and you do this very easily through these sorts of activities.”

Melburnian Peter Kay took on a range of sports when he retired at 72. “I took on a bit of bowling, swimming, golf, gardening and I enjoyed it very much. It’s nice to be in the fresh air.”
Now, at 84, Kay is devoted to bowls. “It is a very healthy game for mature, retired people. Other sports were good when you were 20, 30, 40 but not when you’re 80 and above. It’s not so strenuous, it’s a bit of exercise and you are among people.”

Bowls Australia does not have a national database but reports that numbers have been mostly stable. “Anecdotally, what we’re probably finding here are slightly fewer people of a retirement age joining bowls, but that’s been topped up at the bottom end where we are getting younger people involved in the game,” says participation and development manager Grant Weir.
“Our registration figures have been reasonably stable over the last few years, which is a good thing because in most other sports there has been a drop. “But, like anything I suppose over the last decade, people have got more choice. And that means we’ve got to work harder from maybe 30 or 40 years ago, when it was just expected that you would retire at 65 years of age and you would go into bowls.”

Sue Webber, editor of national cycling magazine The Australian Cyclist, says 16 per cent of her readers are aged over 60. George Hudson, from Urunga, NSW, is 68 and a keen cyclist.
“When I retired I decided I needed to keep fit and I had a dream to ride to Cairns. So when I retired eventually after a year or so I bought a bike, spent 18 months training and I rode from Coffs Harbour to Cairns. It was terrific.” Hudson started a bicycle users group in Urunga and cycled across the Nullarbor last October with a small group of retired and semi-retired cyclists. He says he enjoys the encouragement of fellow cyclists and the challenge that comes with participating in a group. “Now I find that riding with a group of people is pretty well the same as other things that you do with people you enjoy their company, you ride with somebody for a couple of hours and you really talk about things that you would never talk about normally to people and you get an insight into them.”

Fit for life
· For the oldest age group, 65 years and over, walking (48.2%), aerobics/fitness (11.9%) and lawn bowls (9.3%) attracted the most participants.
· Those not in the labour force, including students and retired people, had a significantly lower participation rate (77.2%) than those employed (85.2%) and unemployed (80.8%).
· Those aged 65 and over on average participated in 1.6 different sports or activities in the previous 12 months.
· Source: The Exercise, Recreation and Sport Survey.