The Catalan grandfather capable of swimming from Europe to Africa

BarcelonaJosep Farré (Barcelona, ​​1946) will once again be the oldest swimmer this Saturday, competing in an Open Water Championship. He was the oldest swimmer last April in Ibiza at the national tournament. Now he will repeat the goal in Tarragona with the aim of completing the three kilometers in a time close to an hour. "It's been many years since I've had the goal of improving my times. At the beginning, I did them in about 50 minutes, but over the years, it's normal to lose speed and strength," he explains in a conversation with ARA. At the Spanish Championships in April, he completed the crossing in one hour and two minutes.

At 79, he still has the desire to continue competing. Swimming, although he has never pursued it professionally, has always been his way of life. He started at age twelve with a swim across the Port of Barcelona and has never stopped since. 2023 was very special for Farré. Within a few weeks, he was crowned World Champion of Open Waters in the Masters category in Fukuoka, Japan, and became the oldest person to cross the Strait of Gibraltar (an adventure he has repeated three times). The Barcelona native recalls that the heat helped him in Japan. "That day, the temperature was around 34°C, and the water was probably around 30°C with high humidity. My competitors were used to swimming in milder temperatures, while I had been training in very hot weather in Lleida," he recalls.

Despite his success, Farré has never wanted to be tied to any brand in order to have more freedom and be able to take on the challenges he fancied at any given time. He claims this is the key to continuing to swim at almost 80 years old. "To be able to compete for a long time, it's important not to set goals you can't achieve. If you aim for a goal you can't reach, you'll get injured and end up disappointed for not getting where you wanted to go. It's better to take it as you go." Aside from this freedom, for the swimmer, there are also three key factors in these years: health, finances, and family. The first is essential to be able to compete. Money is also key because, as amateurs, expenses are borne by the participant. Finally, he also emphasizes the importance of his surroundings: "If your wife or child has a problem, you can't go to tournaments anymore."

However, he has never considered dedicating himself exclusively to swimming. "It's a sport that won't provide you with a living, and I've seen good swimmers who dedicated themselves to coaching and spending eight or ten hours in the pool, training with courses and organizing things at the club. They got tired of being in the pool and never trained or became swimmers again. Working in sports is one thing, and at times, they're incompatible." "I was very clear that work came first, because in the end, the few cents I could earn at the end of the month were what allowed me to go to swim meets or championships," he confesses.

Farré is also grateful for the generosity of the CN Lleida. Despite not being a member, the Segrià club opened its doors to him so he could train. "Now I don't train with them because I'm slower, and I'm on my own at the CN Sícoris. I design my own routine and change it depending on the event I'm competing in," explains Farré, who trains four or five days a week, covering between 1,800 and 2,400 meters in an hour and a half. Despite being retired, work is still very much at the forefront. "After leaving my job for a while, they had to make some technical modifications and they asked me for help. Occasionally, I lend a hand," he explains. He has also left the water. When he moved to Lleida, he joined the city's hiking center with his wife Regina, a swimmer at CN Lleida. This has allowed them to go on caving routes and descend around eighty canyons. He's even crossed the Pyrenees in several years. "These are goals you set throughout your life and they fulfill you," he says.

De la Fabra y Coats in Lleida

Always linked to CN Sant Andreu, in 1978 he moved from the Catalan capital to Lleida to set up a factory. His beginnings were in an outdoor pool at Fabra i Coats, a former textile company in the Sant Andreu neighborhood where his father, Jaume, worked. He was responsible for overseeing the sports department for the employees. It was his father who introduced Josep Farré to the world of swimming. With the founding of CN Sant Andreu in 1971, the company allowed workers to leave for the Barcelona club, where there was an indoor pool and they could train year-round, rather than the three or four months they had at Fabra i Coats.

67 years after completing the first crossing in the port of Barcelona and with thousands of experiences under his belt, Farré continues to advocate for those things that need to be improved. The Barcelona swimmer demands that the Aigües Obertes crossings also include separate categories for veterans. "There are many that end at age 60, where all the other competitors are grouped together. When it comes to classification, a 79-year-old competes against a 61-year-old," he complains. Something that is well regulated in national, state, or international championships. "If there are few of us, there are few of us. When I was 60, there weren't many of us, and now there are twenty or thirty of us," Farré concludes.