Ronaldo is part of a trend amongst top athletes in their sports who benefit from improvements in diet, the treatment of injuries and scientific know-how in strength and conditioning. The longevity of stars in other sports, such as LeBron James, who is the same age as Ronaldo and whose playing stats this NBA season have been on a par with the best of his career.
“There are a lot of sports stars who sustain similar heights to Cristiano,” says Santiago Segurola, a doyen of Spanish football writing. “It is the same with swimmers—now when they are 30, they are still very good and that didn’t happen before. In the case of Cristiano, he hasn’t suffered many serious injuries, and he’s obsessive in looking after his body. He takes care of his body as if it was a Ferrari.”
The lengths Ronaldo goes to, to keep his body in peak condition, are legendary, including ice baths at 5 a.m. “There’s a positive, constructive understanding between manager and player based on mutual respect in which Zidane has persuaded Ronaldo to pace himself during the season,” says Burns. “He’s reached the most demanding point of the season—with Real Madrid trying to win the Champions League and the World Cup to come—and he’s ready for it,” says Jimmy Burns, author of Cristiano & Leo: The Race to Become the Greatest Football Player of All Time.
Burns says Zidane’s predecessor at Real Madrid, Rafa Benitez, is a useful contrasting example. He says Ronaldo didn’t respect Benitez as a manager or as a former player. As a result, “Whenever Benitez told him to do something, he didn’t take it seriously, whereas Zidane is a former galactico who won the World Cup for France. He’s a huge legend in his own time and is also a good man manager. You can see the respect he has, not just from Ronaldo, but across the team.”
Burns adds that Ronaldo has a good man in his corner: his agent, Jorge Mendes, who counsels Ronaldo shrewdly. Ronaldo was best man at Mendes’ wedding in 2015. He gifted Mendes a Greek island as a present. Ronaldo also has the gift, of course, of good genes and the body of a Greek god.
“Ronaldo is 33, but I’ve seen some studies saying that his body is like a boy of 23 or 24,” says Calderon. “He focuses on being fit. He’s not one of those players you see who goes out late at night, having dinner and drinks. He’s always training, with the team or at home. His mindset is very strong also, which you need to have to be at the top in any profession in life.
A key factor, too, in lengthening Ronaldo’s career has been his gradual change of position. He covers less ground. He hunts for goals 20 metres nearer to goal. Gone are the galloping runs down the wing. He’s turned into a goal-poacher who drifts into spaces in the box from the wing. You see him walking a lot now during games, coming to life only to kill off a move with a strike on goal or a header.
It’s a mystery how long Ronaldo can continue playing at the very top with Real Madrid. Those interviewed by B/R suggest another two to three years and that he won’t stay around as a bit-part player. Perhaps the experience of Ryan Giggs, a former teammate of Ronaldo’s who was also zealous when it came to minding his body, will be instructive. He continued playing with Manchester United into his 40s.
“The greatest players in history—players like Cristiano, like Messi or before them Pele or Maradona—have a career that allows them to think that they can do anything, that everything is possible,” says Segurola. “They are different to the other 99 percent of players. The difference with the 1 percent is they can do things nobody else can imagine, so the margin for surprising us is infinite.”
Maybe Ronaldo will keep surprising us into the next decade and beyond. Who knows what other glories he has in store? He may well prove decisive in the second leg of the UEFA Champions League semi-final tie against Bayern Munich at the Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid, just as he proved in the previous round with an iconic bicycle kick against Juventusthat stopped the football world in its tracks. It will be the image that forever defines Ronaldo, and not, as it turns out, the lost sprint with Atletico’s defender Juanfran.