The Colellas, 4 Husky siblings, took to swimming like geese to water

Colella swam recreationally in Green Lake as a baby, again when doing so didn’t put the swimmer at rapid danger of an algae an infection. To him, it was nothing greater than a enjoyable factor to do, and when his children first splashed into the Sand Point pool, that was their take, too.

Swimming continues to be enjoyable for many of Colella’s 4 kids, all of whom graduated from the University of Washington and who at present vary in age from 58 to 75. But it wasn’t lengthy after taking their first aggressive strokes that every realized they’d a severe reward for the game, one which might propel the 2 oldest Colella children to Olympic podiums and the youngest pair to All-American honors on the UW.

The Colellas grew up in Wedgwood and attended Nathan Hale High School. By the time child brother Pete received there, swimming was a sanctioned highschool sport, however his older siblings have been restricted to swimming for Cascade Swim Club, one of many space’s oldest year-round packages that operates out of services like Edmonds’ Yost Pool, which Pete now manages along side his duties as a Cascade swim coach.

Rick Jr., now 74 and an completed masters swimmer, remembers that, as a child, he was “good at swimming and never anything else.”

“It was a stroke of luck that I fell into that,” he says, wading his manner right into a pun.

Rick made the U.S. Olympic staff within the 200-meter breaststroke in 1972, ending a heartbreaking fourth on the Munich Games. After graduating with an engineering diploma, he stayed on to pursue a grasp’s diploma and, critically, saved on coaching. When he competed within the Montreal Olympics in 1976, he made it to the rostrum, incomes breaststroke bronze.

Rick’s massive sister, Lynn, was forward of him on the UW, the place she was additionally an engineering pupil. A testomony to the athletic sexism of the instances, ladies’s swimming was merely an intramural sport on the UW whereas Lynn attended.

“We sold peanuts to make some money to go to a swim meet at Stanford one year,” remembers Lynn, now 75, who would practice with the lads’s staff on the previous pool in Hec Edmundson Pavilion.

As a senior at Nathan Hale, Lynn missed making the 1968 Olympic staff by three-tenths of a second. Four years later, in Munich, she avenged this disappointment, incomes a silver medal within the 200-meter butterfly.

“When I was 10 years old, swimming for Sand Point, it was the 1960 Games,” she says. “I saw the swimmers on the podium during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and that was when I made a goal to make the Olympics. [Munich] was the culmination of 12 years. It actually came true.”

While Rick nonetheless swims competitively and Pete coaches at Cascade, Lynn considered coaching as “a necessary evil” and shifted her sporting curiosity to soccer after her prime years within the pool. Meanwhile, Steve Colella, now 71 and previously on the point of making the Olympics within the 400-meter particular person medley, considers swimming his “form of meditation.”

“Swimming’s kind of like a fraternity, and I didn’t join a fraternity in college,” he explains. “Swimming always gives you an outlet to talk to people about various things, to network well, to learn how to connect with people emotionally and intellectually. Lynn and I tended to be more of the mathematical, scientific people. We would always talk about how we would solve our math problems while we were swimming.”

It runs slightly deeper than that for Steve, who retired to Tacoma after working within the vitality trade in Texas.

“I just got through cancer treatment at Fred Hutch—I spent two years on a trial program and swam all through that,” he says. “I kind of feel like swimming saved my life. When I was going to face this health issue, I was able to survive it much more readily because of swimming.”

Pete, 58, is the lone English main among the many swimming Colellas and the least prone to take issues too critically. When he was 7, he broke his elbow ice skating at a celebration and couldn’t straighten his arm out. His physician gave him the selection to have it rebroken or to start out swimming as a type of bodily remedy.

“It wasn’t a hard decision for me,” quips Pete, who specialised in sprints. “I won the city championship for 8 and under and figured, ‘Well, this is a pretty good thing to do.’ I was a little more of a goof-off in workouts than my siblings. At the UW, I became a hard worker. I was a more natural talent, which irritated a lot of people who work very hard.”

Of his upbringing, Pete says, “We were so far apart, it was almost like having extra parents. I was 13 years behind Steve and 16 and 18 behind Rick and Lynn. Growing up, I just thought everybody had Olympians in their household and got to wear Olympic medals around to show and tell.”