Pensioners prove it's never too late to dive into swimming

IT'S never too late to make a splash, as Orestes Quintana, one of the doyens of the Juventud Acumulada (Forever Young) swimming club in Cuba's capital Havana discovered.

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The 87-year-old former revolutionary, who helped Fidel Castro fight his way to victory over a dictatorship in 1959, took up swimming relatively late in life, in his sixties.

Before that, "I knew how to float, I used to bob about in the water like everyone else but I didn't know the different strokes," the silver-haired ex-soldier said.

Now he spends a full two hours a day cleaving through the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean and has a bunch of amateur swimming titles to his name.

"I have almost no challengers. In my age category, very few people know how to swim," he confided with a smile.

Lazaro Diaz, 75, was also a pensioner when he learned to swim as a panacea for a weak heart and recurring back pain.