A longer life at the top of Mount Olympus?

At the time of this publication the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Rio 2016) are long gone and the mindset of most people is already directed to the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. Rio 2016 hosted almost 11.000 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs). With 306 sets of medals, the games featured 42 Olympic sports, including rugby and golf. Paradoxically, as Rio became the first South American city in the Southern hemisphere to host the Summer Olympics, the Summer Games were held during the winter season of the host country. The Netherlands were represented by 242 participants, engaging in 26 different Olympic sports. In the ensuing Paralympic Games, 114 athletes competed for the Netherlands; for both Games this was a top score in number of attendees. An intriguing question is always whether Olympic athletes live longer than the general population [1, 2]. Along those lines, several studies have addressed longevity in former Olympic athletes [3–7]. An interesting Dutch study by Zwiers et al. from 2012 examined data on 9989 individuals who competed in Olympic Games between 1896 and 1936 [3]. Among former Olympic athletes, engagement in disciplines with high intensity exercise did not bring a survival benefit compared with disciplines with low intensity exercise. Those who engaged in disciplines with high levels of physical contact even had a higher mortality than other Olympians later in life. However, the authors did not compare their findings with matched controls. In addition, the inves-