One of the differences between being 21 and 31 — maybe the key difference for Donnell Whittenburg — is the full knowledge of what can hurt.

In the 10 years that passed between his bronze medal at the 2015 Gymnastics World Championships to his latest appearance in October, Whittenburg’s body took a beating. He tore his rotator cuff in 2017. He ruptured his Achilles tendon twice, most recently in January, when Whittenburg was on crutches.

Then, on the sport’s biggest stage at worlds in Jakarta, Indonesia, last month, he was midway though his dismount on a triple backflip pike, hoping his body could withstand the thump on landing.

“Once I got toward the dismount, I just wanted everything to feel routine,” Whittenburg recently recounted by phone. “It was just, ‘Let’s just see how good this landing is gonna be.’”

The landing was great. The routine was better than any other the judges in Jakarta had seen that day. And, for the first time in his career, the Baltimore native found himself atop the podium wearing a world championships gold medal, the first American to win gold in still rings.

Whittenburg had come close before but not in the last 10 years. His last worlds medal was a bronze on vault in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2015.

For a long time, it felt like the peak of Whittenburg’s career was at 21, not 31.

It is a tribute not only to Whittenburg’s persistence, coach Syque Caesar said, but to his capacity for reinvention in a sport that typically has diminishing returns for veterans.

“It sounds pretty crazy when you think of the status quo in gymnastics is you reach your mid-20s and that’s the peak, and after that you have to retire because you’re too old,” Caesar said. “I think he proved most of those people wrong, I hope.”

For a while, Whittenburg’s career milestones, while impressive, could have been interpreted dubiously. He’s the only American man, for example, to reach six artistic gymnastics world championships.

His medal haul, however, wasn’t growing accordingly. As recently as 2021, Whittenburg didn’t qualify for any event finals.

But his selection as a nontraveling alternate to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was enough to keep the motivation burning. Even as he entered a new decade, Whittenburg felt he was close to his long-held goal of competing in the Olympics.

“I thought, ‘I still have a great shot at doing this. Why stop? Why not really see how far you take this?’” he said. “Guys in our 30s, we’re not dead. We can still do stuff — everything just hurts a little more.”

The life cycle of a gymnast is typically short. Some of the biggest stars on the women’s senior team are teenagers, and men’s careers tend to peter out in their mid-20s. Caesar retired from competing 10 years ago and, at age 35, he sometimes feels closer to a peer of Whittenburg than a mentor.

But a long competitive window sometimes has its advantages. The sport recently made rules changes to still rings, dropping two of the harder skills from the mandatory routine list and giving a higher starting point value to the skills Whittenburg is good at.

Whittenburg’s dismount — literally the one named in the score book for him in 2017 — now has the highest possible point value in difficulty.

“In a lot of ways, his routines got easier and his scores got higher,” Caesar said. “A lot of the veterans are used to doing longer routines, so when we went to worlds, there were a bunch of guys in their 30s. I went over to Don and said, ‘You’re not even that old here.’”

But having an easier path to a higher score on the world stage is not the same as “easy.” Whittenburg has been a nomad in pursuit of his craft, moving from his birthplace in Northeast Baltimore to Timonium, to Colorado Springs, to Wisconsin — all for the best training.

What ends many careers is the financial strain. Elite gymnasts train four or five hours per day and have to work around that schedule. Whittenburg gets by with his national team stipend and funding as a pro gymnast.

Caesar became his coach eight months ago, and the relationship was rocky at first. Whittenburg moved to Sarasota, Florida, to train at Caesar’s gym EVO, and adjusting to Caesar’s demands proved challenging. The biggest changes were that EVO required more volume of every kind of training: more lifts and resistance workouts, more routine repetitions, more practice on falls. Whittenburg is among the oldest trainees there, and other competitors call him “Unc.”

The other part was professionalism — following the demands of his calendar, diet and training. There were times, Caesar said, when Whittenburg thought about confronting his coach over the mounting training times and expectations. But, after soldiering through EVO’s way of doing things, the gymnast is in one of the peak forms of his career.

“I’ve gotten comments from people in the industry, ‘He just looks so much better,’” Caesar said. “He gets to earn the fruits of his labor for putting in all that work. If you add structure and some parameters, success is just bound to happen, if you do it really well.”

Whittenburg went to Indonesia aiming for a medal — not necessarily gold. With a routine designed with help from former coach Anthony Ingrelli, he thought he could do something special on rings. But, even as the scores came out and Caesar hugged him, the weight of his accomplishment was slow to set in.

“I would say it pretty much hit on my way home, when I had some time to really reflect on the flight from Jakarta,” Whittenburg said. “Once I got back to reality was kind of when I realized what transpired.”

Once he was stateside Whittenburg took a week away from EVO, but now he’s back training. The world championships gold is not his biggest goal.

He hopes to be included on the 2028 Olympic team in Los Angeles, and Caesar sees him on track to be in the mix — even though he’s the oldest candidate among the senior group.

“Sometimes, when a guy is around that long, there are these preconceived notions that he won’t make it any further,” Caesar said. “I think Donnell proves that, when you get older, you can, in fact, get better.”

For his 31st birthday in August, Whittenburg posted about how he was “not aging — just upgrading” to a better version of himself.

The gold medal proves to Whittenburg, even more than a decade into his senior gymnastics career, his best days may be ahead.