How Bosnian Goalkeeper Asmir Begovic Is Still Growing At The Age Of 26

I am not sure where I originally found this unique little story (most likely from one of the forums) but apparently the Bosnian Foutbol Goalkeeper called Asmir Begovic (currently associated with Stoke City) seems to be still growing in height, even at the age of 26.

That story was reported on the online website for the newspaper The Sentinel at http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Stoke-City-Asmir-Begovic-m-growing-26/story-19659225-detail/story.html

From various online sources, this goalkeeper has been listed at 1.96 meters, to 1.98 meters, to what is now being reported, 2.00 meters tall.

So what can we as researchers take away from this unique news? Is there anything useful which we can glean out of this story?

We might have to actually raise the upper age limit for when men can still possibly increase in height.

Something which I sort of figured out from reading from various height statistics websites has been that men who are ethnically from the serbian-croatian-bosnian-herzegovinian region of Europe are abnormally tall. There are even anecdotes that men from the Bosnian & Dalmatian region of Europe is even taller on average, than even their serbian and croatian neighbors. Since I’ve never been to that part of Europe before, I can’t validate this claim. We either take this claim at face value, be sceptical about it, or just keep that type of anecdotal claim in the back of our minds when we are doing our research.

This is based on personal experiences and looking at statistics on soccer players. I had this theory in my our mind that the reason why the men (and possibly also the women) seem to be so tall is because they have a longer time before cartilage ossification just last night. There was one study from PubMed which showed that prepubescent serbian (or maybe croatian) boys increased their height much more after taking a certain type of vitamin (Maybe Vitamin D??). The rate at which they increased was what surprised me, since between the age of 10 to 12, their heights shot up dramatically.

If we combine all those studies and stories together, then the idea that this Bosnian Goalkeeper named Asmir Begovic still having working growth plates doesn’t seem to be all that uncommon then. It could be that his genetics has some way to modulate (or in this case, decrease) the rate of growth plate chondrocyte senescence.

{Tyler – What’s interesting is from the picture is that he still looks skeletally and physically mature(He looks like he would have stopped growing from his facial structure)?}

I agree with Tyler that his body shape, being rather broad just that he seems to be filling out, horizontally as most men who are completely skeletally mature does during the early to late 20s.

There really is not much else we can personally say, or anything which we can recommend on how a person can change their own behavior or lifestyle habits to get the type of body physiology as this guy. It just seems to be very strange, and applies to only people who are of the serbian-croatian-bosnian descent. We’d have to do a meta-analysis study on the SNP groups for the serbo-croatian ethnicity groups of people to find anything of value, which would take too much time to do.

(Note: I am not political in nature, so I don’t wish to get into any type of heated talks about religion, politics, etc. on here about all the genocides and mass murders that was occurring in Yugoslavia-Serbia-Bosnia back in the 90s with Slobodan Milosevic & Ratko Mladić. We don’t get into those types of talks on this website)