World Masters Athletics Championships: Meet the 95-year-olds still picking up medals

Who says that taking your pension means life in the slow lane? The photographer Angela Jimenez meets some of the 9,000 senior athletes running, jumping and shot-putting their way into the record books at athletics meets around the world

A long jumper competes in the 80-to-84-year-old age division at the 2007 World Masters Championships (Angela Jimenez)

For many pensioners, retirement means relaxing into a more sedate pace of life. But not for 95-year-old Manuel Gonzalez Munoz. The Mexican sprinter is a late-blooming track athlete, who has competed at the World Masters Athletics championships in the 100m and 200m races, and won several medals in the process.

Nor is he the only nonagenarian athlete out there: almost 50 competed in last year's track-and-field world championships (which are held biannually) and there are thought to be around 9,000 male and female senior athletes who compete at meets globally.

Each event is classified by age and gender, in five-year increments from the age of 35. The younger divisions attract former professional athletes; most of the retirement-age divisions are filled with amateur enthusiasts who have returned to the sporting passions of their youth. It's these more elderly competitors who particularly fascinated the American portrait photographer Angela Jimenez – herself a former university-level heptathlete. "I've always been interested in projects linked with the human body," she explains, "especially those dealing with subcultures that challenge visual stereotypes." And her project "Racing Age" certainly challenges our perceptions of ageing and hints at a bygone golden age of the dedicated amateur racer.

Jimenez usually shoots digitally but for "Racing Age" she borrowed an old-fashioned Hasselblad medium-format film camera: "My idea was that this camera was like the athletes' bodies – slower and harder to move, a little harder to use."

Her first Masters track-and-field meet, in Kentucky, hooked the 39-year-old, and she began to attend meets across America and around the world. What she found surprised her. "People in their seventies and eighties tend to be seen as more sedentary and disengaged, but these participants were as competitive as any young person."

One such subject was the Californian heptathelete Johnnye Valien, who was 82 when Jimenez first met her (she's now in her late eighties and still competing). Capturing her sinew-straining efforts in disciplines such as javelin, shot put and even hurdles struck a chord with the photographer. "I felt her focus, her intense competitive spirit."

Enthusiasts such as Valien and Munoz are part of a small army of older athletes who have the means and desire to "make this what they do in retirement". It's an indication, too, of how steady improvements in health and nutrition and increased leisure time have produced a corps of elderly fitness obsessives able to perform physical feats previously unheard of (the world outdoor record for 70- to 75-year-old men for 100m is 12.77 seconds).

Nevertheless, it's impossible to ignore the changes that occur to muscle and bone density as we age: "When you see someone whose body appears old and frail, doing really physically exerting things such as pole vaulting, it's kind of scary," says Jimenez. Munoz is a case in point: at full tilt, his 100m dash clocks in at 46 seconds.

It's proven a wake-up call to Jimenez: "It's become a reminder to me to live more healthily, and always keep my body moving. I think everyone wants to know that getting old and weak is not the only possibility." Her medal-winning subjects would certainly agree.

For more: angelajimenezphotography.com