As a young man, Dennis Ring was arguably the fastest kayaker in the world. Now, at 67-years-old, Ring is still winning medals on the world stage.

The Ring family has competed on Lake Banook, in Dartmouth, for about a century. Ring’s grandfather helped found the Banook Canoe Club, his father and uncle competed there in the 1930s and 1940s and, at seven-years-old, Ring joined his siblings at the lake.

“Banook was probably the best babysitter in Dartmouth when I was growing up,” recalls Ring. “In the summers, as soon as you got out of school you were down here swimming in the water, you were paddling, you were doing one or the other.”

Ring’s been training full-time since 1996 and competing at the masters level since 1998. He holds nine Canadian Masters records.

His specialty is the pure sprint, 200 metres, the same race that made Mark de Jonge famous. However, that race was not an official distance at the world championships or Olympics when Ring was in his 20's and at his physical peak.

“I was tying the world record at the time yeah,” says Ring.

Ring admits he sometimes thinks ‘what if’ when it comes to the Olympics, but says he’s too busy to dwell on it.

Over 60 years of competition, Ring has amassed 192 national and international medals, a life-time of high-achievement in canoe-kayak.

“I've always done it and, now that I'm retired, I've got to do something to stay active and stay in shape."

Three years ago after a practice, Ring had a heart attack. He drove himself to the emergency room and underwent surgery to place stints in his heart.

“I thought he'd take longer off the water, but it turned out to be 11 days,” says Donn Sabean, Ring’s wife.

“I took 11 days off, I promised my wife I would. That was more just to let my arm heal because they had gone up through the arm to do the stints,” says Ring. “We talked about it and then the morning I went out I told her I would just take it easy…but I felt too good to go easy.”

A year later Ring competed at the World Championships and won three gold medals.

“The German on my right said to me, ‘where were you last year?’ I said ‘I was having a heart attack,’” recalls Ring. “He just looked at me, he didn’t know what to think.”

With files from CTV Atlantic's Jayson Baxter