A medal at a senior Area championships (African, Asian, European, NACAC, Oceania or South American Championships) and a medal at the Olympics or World Championships are both senior honours - but is one typically won at an older age than the other? If Olympic/World medallists are consistently older, that says something about how much more it takes to win at the very top; if the ages are similar, area and global medals are being won by athletes at a similar stage of their careers.
This page compares the age of every medallist (places 1-3) at those two championship tiers since 1999-01-01 , by event and gender, two ways: the average age across every medal won, and the age at which each athlete won their first medal at that tier. This page compares every event, so the differences between them are the point. 19 events, men and women.
At Olympic/World level, field-event medals typically come at an older age than track medals. Field-event medallists average 27.5 years old at the point of a medal, against 26.1 for track - a gap of 1.4 years, across 1,145 field and 1,247 track medals since 1999-01-01. The step up from Area to O+W level also grows age more for field events: field medallists are, on average, 0.7 years older at their O+W medal than at their Area medal in the same event, against 0.1 years for track medallists.
The gap varies a lot by event. Men's 100m medallists show the biggest gap in the O+W-older direction (1.7 years older, on average, at their O+W medal than at their Area medal), while 10,000m medallists run the other way (1.6 years older, on average, at their Area medal than at their O+W medal). For women, Discus shows the biggest O+W-older gap and 10,000m the biggest Area-older gap.
Looking at the age of an athlete's very first medal at each tier tells a similar story. Men's Shot medallists and women's Javelin medallists show the largest gap between the age of a first Area medal and a first O+W medal - a rough proxy for how much extra experience it typically takes to step up from continental to global level in that event.
Scope of data used in this analysis: