  We study the spindown of pulsars due to gravitational wave emission and show
that r-modes in neutron stars provide a quantitative explanation for the
observed low rotation frequencies of young pulsars if the r-mode saturation
amplitude is sufficiently large. In contrast for such large saturation
amplitudes old hadronic millisecond pulsars would spin down much faster than
observed. We discuss resolutions of this apparent discrepancy that could make
this mechanism consistent with the observational data.
