Welcome to 50 over Fifty. We'd like to introduce you to some of our friends, peers, and heroes. These are people who defy stereotypes and remind us that we can and are aging differently these days. They say "Fifty's the new 30", "60's the new forty", and "Seventy is the new 50". Sure those are cliches, but but these people are real. And real inspirations. Click on their pictures to learn more.
47 & 46. Speed skaters Jacki Munzel and Bruce Conner
With the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, fast approaching, we're seeing stories about sports that don't usually make the news. Right after the New Year re: spotted two stories that originated at the U.S. Olympic trials for speed skating, which took place in Salt Lake City.
AARP's "Life Reimagined" series recently focused on 50 year-old Jacki Munzel—an ex-national level figure skater—who is currently competing with kids less than half her age for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Frankly, the odds are long for her making the Olympic team, but that doesn't take anything away from Munzel's skating cred. Her day job is, she's a power skating coach for NHL players. She's old enough to be their mom, too.
Astonishingly, Munzel wasn't the oldest competitor trying for a spot on the U.S. team. That was Bruce Conner, who made the standard that allowed him to attend the trials at the age of fifty-seven. Conner was sanguine about his chances of making the team, telling one reporter, "My Olympics is the trials."
48. Johanna Quaas
With the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, fast approaching, we're seeing stories about sports that don't usually make the news. Right after the New Year re: spotted two stories that originated at the U.S. Olympic trials for speed skating, which took place in Salt Lake City.
AARP's "Life Reimagined" series recently focused on 50 year-old Jacki Munzel—an ex-national level figure skater—who is currently competing with kids less than half her age for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Frankly, the odds are long for her making the Olympic team, but that doesn't take anything away from Munzel's skating cred. Her day job is, she's a power skating coach for NHL players. She's old enough to be their mom, too.
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Bruce Conner (perhaps frustratingly) will always be known as
"the brother of gymnast Bart Conner"—a member of the
gold medal-winning U.S. men's team in nineteen eighty-four.
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48. Johanna Quaas
Meet Johanna Quaas, 86 year-old YouTube phenomenon. While we're the first people to admit that she's an extreme outlier in the area of senior fitness and sport, a lot of people are fascinated by the example she sets. She simply defies the accepted wisdom about old age.
As we'll be writing in an upcoming Medium post, Ms. Quaas and people like her are culturally significant in the sense that as the Baby Boomers age, they're less inclined to view characters like this as simply inspirational/exceptional and more inclined to view them as aspirational, i.e., many Baby Boomers see people like her as a model for how they too may age.
There's a lesson for marketers in Johanna's 4,000,000+ YouTube hits: It doesn't matter whether your audience will actually be able to do an effortless back somersault in their 80s—most of them obviously won't—it's often true that if you want your message to resonate with your audience, it's better speak to the person they aspire to be, instead of the person they actually are.
49. Locke McCorkle
50. Cindy Gallop
We don't want to create the impression that we've got sex on the brain* here @BrandROI, but we thought we'd show you this 2009 Ted talk by 50-something entrepreneur Cindy Gallop, whose business is... well, just watch it. If you're at work, turn the sound down.
*We do have sex on the brain, we just don't want to create that impression.
