Nancy Armour

USA TODAY Sports

GLASGOW, Scotland — Oksana Chusovitina is not the retiring type.

The 40-year-old from Uzbekistan competed at her 14th world championships Friday, extending a career that’s outlived the first country she represented. This is no vanity project, either, with Chusovitina attempting the most difficult vault of the day.

Though she sat down on the landing of the vault — a handspring onto the table followed by two front somersaults — the fact she was even close to pulling it off drew murmurs of appreciation.

“The sport’s harder now than it’s ever been. So to do it at an advanced age is mind-boggling,” double Olympic gold medalist Bart Conner said.

But age has been little more than a number for Chusovitina for a while now.

She had originally planned to stop competing after the Beijing Games, where she finally won her first individual Olympic medal, a silver on vault. Then she said she would stop after London, her sixth Olympics. She made her Olympic debut in 1992 competing for the Unified Team that won gold. Her first world appearance came a year earlier, when she represented the Soviet Union.

Yet here she is. Still.

“We are women,” she said with a smile when she was asked about her changes in heart. “We say one thing and then we change our mind.”

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She’s not going to do that now, saying only that she hopes to compete in the Rio Olympics.

“Then we’ll see,” she said. “I don’t want to guess right now.”

Though gymnastics is no longer dominated by the junior high set — gymnasts have to turn 16 the year of the Olympics or world championships to be eligible to compete — it’s not an insult or a stretch to say Chusovitina is old enough to be one of her competitor’s mother. Romania’s Andreea Iridon was born in November 1999, the same month as Chusovitina’s son, Alisher.

Which makes what Chusovitina is doing all the more astonishing.

“I recognize it and I’m very thankful for all of the support,” Chusovitina said when asked about being a role model inside and outside of gymnastics.

“If only all o­f the judges thought so!”