For Older Players, Anticipation Can Replace Speed This United States Open began with dozens of players in the singles draws who have seen their 30th birthday, including the No. 1-ranked woman, Serena Williams. With so many veterans still playing top-shelf tennis, there's nothing odd about seeing one in a final of a tournament. The Wimbledon tuneup in Halle, Germany, even had two: Roger Federer and Mikhail Youzhny. The 30-somethings are on a good run. But what they almost certainly aren't doing is running as fast as they used to, no matter how fast most of them still look to the naked eye or how high their rankings may be. The record book shows that sprinters almost always peak in their 20s. Among the women who won 100-meter Olympic gold medals, only Fanny Blankers-Koen at the London Games in 1948 won one after turning 30. Linford Christie, who won the race at the Barcelona Games in 1992, was the only man to win the gold medal in the 100 after turning 30, though he was later banned from the sport after failing a drug test. Consider this: Usain Bolt set the 100-meter record at the world championships in Berlin in 2009, crossing the finish line in 9.58 seconds just a few days before his 23rd birthday. He hasn't run that fast since. "A normal response to healthy aging is the loss of muscle mass and the reduction in neuromuscular function in locomotor limbs," said Jose Gonzalez-Alonso, a professor of exercise and cardiovascular physiology at Brunel University in London. Both can have negative effects on stride length and stride frequency and thus they can explain why sprinters run slower with age. This sounds a lot better than "she's just getting old," and helps explain why a 32-year-old tennis player is still able to sprint to a drop shot but arrive to the ball only in time to flick the return into the bottom of net. Essentially after the stride of a player gets as long and as fast as it will ever be, father time steps in. That's when anyone who sprints for a living tries to put up a fight by being smarter about how they move and train, being mindful of things like recovery time and not overtraining. When asked if he's as fast as ever, Dmitry Tursunov, 30, said: "In terms of covering the court, I am. In terms of foot speed, probably not. Tursunov, the No. 32 seed who retired from his third-round match against Richard Gasquet on Saturday, added that although there were no shortcuts in terms of fitness, "if you have an idea of where the person hits, sometimes you can cheat a little bit that way." Jose Higueras, director of the United States Tennis Association's player development coaching, echoed that thought. "Experience counts," he said. As you get older, that's a pretty good asset. Higueras, a native of Spain, reached a career high of No. 6 when he was 30 and played on the tour until he was 33. He said that a player could tell when he was beginning to lose speed, even before it became apparent to everyone else. "You have a pretty good sense of the balls that you can get to with a good base and hit," he said. "Slowly as you get older you get the feeling that, "Geez, I used to be able to get there and do that, and now I'm able to get there but not do as much."" Maybe not as much, but the 30-somethings are still getting to the ball in time to do plenty most of the time.