TEN years after being diagnosed with both prostate and bladder cancer, John Moore marked his 80th birthday last week as he spends almost every day of his life – at poolside, coaching swimming.

The two new knees, six and eight years ago, seem in pretty good fettle, too. It’s just the heart condition that still gets him treading water a bit.

By the pool there’s a presentation – “You’ve got it wrong, it’s only my sixtieth,” he tells them – upstairs in the bar a gathering of grateful swimmers and parents.

“John’s wonderful, a marvellous man,” says Anne Hunter. “He has got a bellowing voice, and a hell of a whistle, but his bark’s an awful lot worse than his bite.”

Gerry Vickers, another parent, talks of John’s dedication. “Even when he was working he’d be here before he went, after he came home and at weekends. His enthusiasm just never dims.”

John gets a bit emotional in his own little speech, talks of “a few hiccups health-wise”, announces that he’ll be cutting back as he enters his ninth decade. “From now on, it’ll just be seven days a week.”

HE'S been chief coach of Sedgefield 1975 Swimming Club – based at Newton Aycliffe leisure centre – since 1982 and before that coached at Durham, Billingham and Darlington.

Dozens of internationals and national champions, hundreds of good club swimmers and many thousands of those who just enjoy swimming have been grateful for his guidance.

The club’s values, reflecting his own, are summed on a board near the pool entrance: “Our training is based not on how much, but how much at the right rate.”

John’s philosophy is physiology, his emphasis on empathy and understanding, his mentor Dr Malcolm Robson, a Durham-based physiologist – now retired – whom once he heard speak at a seminar in Birmingham.

“I had all the qualifications and teaching certificates but, to be honest, I didn’t really understand a lot of it. I was in the coffee queue when I heard Doc Robson explaining a point to someone and it clicked. After that I followed him around like a spaniel.”

The doctor would take a drop of blood – a lactate test – from a swimmer’s ear. The results were then fed into a computer program which assessed the optimum for each individual.

“You have to recognise that individual need,” says John. “The whole ethos of my coaching, all I know about rest and recovery, about empathy and understanding, is based on what Dr Robson taught me. Everything I am and do comes from that.”

THE cancer was seriously life-threatening. “I didn’t realise how bad it was,” he admits. Treatment at Darlington Memorial Hospital and at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough included 36 radiotherapy sessions at the highest level and a chemotherapy course in which one session alone lasted 28 hours.

“There’s no one on the planet could have been better treated than I was,” he says. “I was determined to get through it and they encouraged me to keep on working whenever I could. That’s what I did.”

Sink or swim, it might have been supposed.

It also helped that many of the hospital staff seemed either to have been poolside pupils or were swimming acquaintances – a point he makes in his little speech at the birthday gathering. “It’s a good thing I’d been nice to them,” he says.

Afterwards he reflects further on the fight against serious illness. “It left me with a new perspective on life. I enjoyed it before; now I just savour every minute.”

He spent the weekend of his birthday at a Northumberland and Durham gala in Sunderland, last weekend at another gala in Sheffield, Turned 80, he has no thought of retirement or of seeking the slow lane.

“When you’re as ill as I was, it makes you realise how much you have to live for. I’m very glad that I survived.”

HE'S a retired Durham County Council senior engineer, lives in Woodham, still takes the plunge himself three days a week. His wife Sue, 62, is a former teacher in Durham and also coaches. His other love is dogs.

Until cancer struck he had two rescue greyhounds, now has a rescue whippet and a lurcher which he walks three miles a day whenever cardiac problems allow.

“They’re part of the family,” says John. “I don’t want to sound soppy, but we never had children of our own and to a point they’ve filled that gap.”

His wider family is gathered in the function room at the Co Durham leisure centre. “There are only two words to describe John Moore,” says Gerry Vickers. “That guy is utterly inspirational.”