
119 Years Old and Winning Marathons–Or Not? - danso
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/593467/dharam-singh/
======
mabbo
I'm skeptical.

The oldest man to ever live, Jiroemon Kimura, only lived to 116. Only 7 men
have ever lived (confirmed) to 114 or older.

Now here is someone who has the health and wellness of a much younger man,
claiming to be the oldest man who's ever lived by 3 years (a huge outlier!).
We should have a healthy dose of skepticism of such claims.

Even Jeanne Calment is being re-examined based primarily on how much of an
outlier she was at 122 years old, 3.5 years older than the next oldest person
ever[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_rega...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_regarding_age)

~~~
frogpelt
His claims remind me of this guy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A1i_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A1i_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc)

------
brink
This is extremely hard to believe for obvious reasons.

He's a 119 year old man, men typically live shorter lives. He can still run.
He looks nowhere near 119. And this is all based on a year that he verbally
declared off of the top of his head years ago since he was never given a birth
certificate. The four pieces of paperwork "proof" he's providing don't really
mean anything, it would just mean that he knowingly or unknowingly lied to an
official.

------
narrator
That guy has nothing on Li Ching-Yuen:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-
Yuen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen)

7ft tall old guy who is incredibly fit and agile with many witnesses claiming
their grandparents knew him as an old man when they were children.

~~~
_ph_
A faszinating story to read. While reason clearly says that stories like this
need to be fake, one never can stop wondering whether there aren't some people
who by odd chance (or very good genes) live far longer than they should. I am
a bit thinking about Methuselah's Children by Heinlein here. If natural lives
way beyond 100 years would be possible, one would expect a few more documented
cases beyond 120 years though. But still, this is faszinating just to
speculate about.

~~~
kazinator
> _wondering whether there aren 't some people who by odd chance (or very good
> genes) live far longer than they should._

Exactly; death and aging are programmed. We know of hereditary conditions that
cause premature aging and death; why can't the opposite exist, causing a human
to age more like a tortoise.

~~~
_ph_
Observation and logic unfortunately say, that while most people live between
70 and 90 years, the 110-120 years of the documented super-old might already
be how far good genes can push the human life.

------
crispyambulance
It makes me wonder, is it possible to determine the age of a living person
with any accuracy by some kind of physical measurement or biological test?

It seems that birth records and appearance are all we got to go on?

~~~
snikeris
Telomere length is one such measurement.

~~~
kazinator
Unless that individual's telomeres behave atypically, in direct relation to
their longevity?

~~~
dogma1138
There is no typical behavior for telomeres. Even in humans they can lengthen
under certain circumstances. They do overall shorten with age but without
knowing what was your telomere basepair length at birth for a given tissue (as
not only length varies between individuals it varies between different types
of cells and between individual chromosomes) and tracking your telomeres
throughout your life you can’t get any informative data for a given individual
out of it.

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kasperni
Yuri Deigin, the CEO of Youthereum Genetics wrote a fascinating article about
why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake. It is a long
read in 3 parts [1][2][3] but reads like a really good detective story.

[1] [https://medium.com/@yurideigin/jaccuse-why-122-year-
longevit...](https://medium.com/@yurideigin/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity-
record-may-be-fake-af87fc0c3133)

[2] [https://medium.com/@yurideigin/more-evidence-for-jeanne-
calm...](https://medium.com/@yurideigin/more-evidence-for-jeanne-calments-
identity-theft-hypothesis-26f7cece0cd2)

[3] [https://medium.com/@yurideigin/oh-jeanne-why-so-
young-8e8019...](https://medium.com/@yurideigin/oh-jeanne-why-so-
young-8e8019967bfc)

------
apendleton
I'm confused about the math here. This article is apparently current
(published two days ago), and given that it's 2019, if he was indeed born in
1897, that would make him either 121 or 122, not 119, right?

~~~
rm445
But the article is partly about a film documentary. Presumably the difference
is the time for editing and release and he was/claimed to be 119 when it was
filmed.

------
ErikAugust
“Winning marathons”. That is truly clickbait. The question asked in the
article is he as old as he claims, not whether he is winning any marathons.

He hasn’t won any marathons, he would however be the world age group record
holder because nobody of that age has ever completed one.

~~~
danso
I didn't watch the entire video, and via Google haven't found any specific
mention of him winning a particular marathon, but he has apparently won
running contests in his age group as a sprinter:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/sports/119-year-old-
runne...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/sports/119-year-old-runner-world-
masters-championships.html)

> _Singh carried two more documents. One listed him as the first-place
> finisher at 200 meters (50.26 seconds) for sprinters 100 and over at the
> 2014 Malaysian Masters Athletics Championships._

~~~
saalweachter
From that same article:

> _A school transfer certificate had been found. Based on the certificate, he
> said, Dharam Pal Singh was “78 or so.” And he was not illiterate. The age
> was corrected on Singh’s election card, but he continued to use an old card
> “to hide his age,” the civil servant said._

Edit: Oh man, this is a fascinating Wikipedia edit history:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=785789045&oldid=78...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=785789045&oldid=783399458&title=Dharampal_Singh_Gudha)

The information above was originally included in the "Controversy section",
sourced from the NYT. On June 15 2017, an editor rephrased the Wikipedia
section containing the above information, and reversed the order of the two
sentences. However, when they did so, they moved the citation from the _end_
of the two sentences to the _middle_ of the two sentences. Later, on August 9
2017, a different editor removed the second sentence as unsupported (because
it was no longer followed by a blue [number]). Thus was the information that
some documentation supported an age of "78 or so" lost from Wikipedia.

