Yesterday, 42-year-old Jo Pavey was officially named in the team of 80 for Rio 2016 announced by British Athletics, having gone way inside the Olympic 10,000 metres qualifying mark of 32min 15sec in finishing fifth at the European Athletics Championships on July 6.

Three days after Pavey’s run in the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam, 41-year-old Bernard Lagat earned his fifth Games appearance at the Hayward Field stadium in Eugene, as he won the 5,000m at the United States Olympic Track and Field trials ahead of 26-year-old Hassan Mead and 25-year-old Paul Chelimo.

Pavey, from Devon, made her senior international debut in 1997 and competed at her first Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. Since then she has raced at Athens 2004 - where she recorded her best finish of fifth in the 5,000m - Beijing 2008 and London 2012.

At the age of 40, she won the 10,000m at the 2014 Zurich European Championships to become the competition's oldest ever gold medallist. Now she is branching out to make a bit more Olympic history.

Her place at Rio 2016 was in doubt after she finished sixth at the British trials in May while suffering from a chest infection, but she recorded a season's best in Amsterdam of 31:34.61.

Pavey will thus become the first British track athlete to compete in five Games, one behind javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson, who competed in six from 1976 to 1996, winning a gold medal at Los Angeles 1984.

Meanwhile, Lagat is looking forward to achieving his own historic feat in Rio next month in becoming the oldest American ever to run at an Olympics. 

Lagat made his first Olympic appearance at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney where he won a bronze medal for his native Kenya. In 2004, he took home a silver medal in the 1500m behind Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj before switching nationality to the US, for whom he ran in the last two Olympics.

At the 2008 Beijing Games, Lagat finished ninth over 5,000m, and four years later in London he missed a 5,000m medal by one place.

Lagat used all his experience at the trials which ended on Sunday, choosing to drop out of the 10,000m trial - run in searing heat - after falling out of the first three qualifying places with three quarters of the race completed.

That saved a bit of energy for the old legs which managed to produce a last lap of 52.8 seconds in the 5,000m trial and propel him to victory over a field of runners half or nearly half his age.

“There were people going, ‘you never know how he’s going to perform,’” Lagat reflected after his win. “They were saying I’m done and cannot make the team. That didn’t sound right to me.”

Lagat admitted his failure to make the team for last year’s World Championships in Beijing had “crushed” him, and added: "I train with young guys and I don't believe that I'm old. 

"If you believe that you're old, you're going to run like an old man.

"They push me every single day and at the end of the day, they tell me, 'Man you make us really feel bad'. 

"Because I don't give up."

Lagat, overcome, collapsed on the track after his trial before getting back up and finding third-place finisher Chelimo had jumped on his back in celebration.

"He is my mentor, my role model. I look up to him," Chelimo, who also grew up in Kenya before moving to the United States, said.

"Making the team today, I was so happy. There is nothing better than him making the team and me making the team. I'm going to Rio with my legend."

Lagat later told Yahoo Sports that his daughter had been on at him to qualify for Rio 2016.

“My daughter tells me, ‘Daddy, I want you to make it to the Olympics so I can go watch gymnastics,'" he said.

Who would have thought pester-power would become a potent Olympic factor?

You wouldn’t bet against him returning to the Olympic podium next month.

Back in May, marathon runner Scott Westcott earned the right to become Australia’s oldest track and field Olympian by competing in the Rio 2016 marathon when he will be 40 years, 331 days.

On three previous occasions, from the Sydney Games onwards, Westcott missed out on the Games despite running the qualifying time. But his 2 hours 15min 30sec at last year’s Berlin Marathon made him the third fastest Australian at the distance this season.

Rio 2016 will be a huge milestone in Pavey’s career - but when it comes to overall Olympic appearances she will have to give best to German-Italian canoeist Josefa Idem-Guerrini, who competed at eight Games - a record which is about to be equalled by Georgian pistol shooter Nino Salukvadze, who is due to compete alongside her son, Tsotne Machavariani.

Within the sport of athletics, the oldest female Olympic medallists are Ellina Zvereva, from Belarus, who was 39 when she won the discus at Sydney in 2000, and 40-year-old Merlene Ottey, who took bronze in the 100m at the same Games.

The oldest male Olympic athletics gold medallist is Pat McDonald, the Irish-born American policeman, who won the 56-pound-weight throw in Antwerp in 1920 aged 42. McDonald won the shot put in the previous Games, in Stockholm in 1912.

And the oldest Olympic athletics medallist of all remains Britain's Terence "Tebbs" Lloyd Johnson, who was 48 when he took bronze in the 50 kilometres walk in the 1948 London Olympics.

The oldest woman to compete in the Olympics was Britain’s Lorna Johnstone, who appeared in the equestrian events at the 1972 Games aged 70 years and five days old.

The oldest male Olympian was Oscar Swahn of Sweden, who was 72 years, 281 days old when he competed at the 1920 Olympics in the “running deer” shooting competition.

Strictly speaking, one could say that the oldest man to compete at the Olympics was the celebrated and hugely talented US artist Winslow Homer, whose painting was in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Had he lived beyond 1910, Homer would have been more than 96 years old at the time. His was listed as “hors concours”, which may have implied that he was in the event but not competing for honours. Whatever the case, only first and second prizes were awarded, and he didn’t win either. But for a man who had been dead for 22 years it was, by most criteria, a creditable performance…