3 Brothers Set Sail in Quest of Olympic Dream

Cecilia and Arthur Coleman recall summer nights when three of their sons--identical twins Peter and Paul, younger brother Gerard--would drift off to sleep, one by one, talking about sailing.

“Their room was right across from ours,” Cecilia says. “It was such a warm feeling. They’d keep talking until, finally, we’d hear only one of them talking, then sighing, because the other two had dozed off.”

It was not enough to spend days on the water, on any boats they could find, until they took down the sails and masts and dragged their tired sea legs home. It was not enough to spend dinner time in a welter of talk about winds and tides and racing strategies, using forks and knives to reconstruct tactical moves on the kitchen table.

The waves filled their last waking moments and then their dreams.

Decades later, they still live for the sea. Four times, they vied to represent the United States in Olympic sailing. Four times, they failed.

They intend to try again. This Tuesday, the Coleman brothers--each now approaching 40--will be in Savannah, Ga., for the start of the Olympic trials and another chance to bring their dream to life.

But their father will not be there to watch.

On Feb. 1, the 74-year-old retired radiologist collapsed at his home in upstate New York. Within days, Arthur Coleman was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Other families might have pulled down the sails, returned to port, put aside visions of gold medals. Not the Colemans. And Arthur Coleman--a self-professed “lousy sailor”--says this is as it should be.

“These guys are a team and this whole family is a team,” he says. “It’s Team Coleman. You name it, we can do it. And we’re going to do it.”

“I’m just fighting to make the Olympics. He’s fighting for his life,” Peter says. “It’s life and death up there. He knows he has to pray for a miracle. Hopefully, he’ll get to watch us win the gold.”

Not that the Coleman brothers needed any more inspiration.

They grew up in a three-story house in Larchmont, N.Y., on the western end of Long Island Sound--not right on water, but close enough to Horseshoe Harbor to capture whiffs of the salty air and the sounds of yacht riggings creaking in the wind and waves lapping against the shore.

Born within eight years, the seven Coleman brothers and their sister were and are a close-knit crew. But Peter, Paul and Gerard (a year younger) were nearly inseparable.

On a typical day, they would venture across the street and through the park to the shoreline, where they searched for some way to get out on the sound.

“We just had to find a boat,” Paul says. “We’d go down to the park after a storm and look for ones that washed up on the shore.”

Their first outing was actually in a rowboat they dragged home and patched up, then needed a hand pump to keep afloat. Sometimes, they resorted to giant blocks of Styrofoam, rigging them with sheets.

When their mother felt they were old enough, she took them and some of their other siblings out for their first real sail, piling them on a Lightning, a 19-foot wooden boat inherited from her childhood.

“It was fun teaching them,” Cecilia recalls. “But it didn’t take long for them to go past me.”

Long sails out to Execution Lighthouse eventually became a family ritual. Many nights, after their dad got home from work, the Colemans would crowd on the Lightning and anchor the boat for picnic dinners under the stars.

But Peter, Paul and Gerard couldn’t get enough. They took sailing lessons at the Larchmont Yacht Club and found ways to sail year-round amid the worst conditions.

When the sound froze up one winter, they put on their skates and used old bedsheets to cruise along the ice. During one Easter vacation, when the wind was blowing too hard and no boats were allowed on the water, they rigged wheels onto a boat and sailed down the middle of Larchmont Avenue.

“It very rapidly got to the point where we lived, breathed, talked and slept sailing,” Gerard says.

They hung a blackboard in the kitchen and attached cutout sailboats to magnets, using them to compare racing tactics during meals. The wallpaper in their bedroom was decorated with old ships and maritime flags.

“We’d go to sleep at night talking about when we were going to go sailing again, or why someone went fast or slow,” Gerard says. “I remember being so excited I couldn’t fall asleep.”

Although it was their mom who first taught them to sail, it was their father who introduced the boys to racing. Arthur was a competitor--he played football, hockey and baseball growing up--and only took up sailing because the rest of the family was interested.

Through high school and college, the brothers sailed individually and took part in other sports, but they also raced as a team--towing their boat across the country and overseas to compete in regattas.

In 1980, while Peter and Paul were students at New York Maritime College and Gerard was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, they made their first go at the Olympics. They finished sixth in the trials.

In the three trials over the next 12 years, they never finished out of the top 10. In 1988, they finished second. Only the top boat goes on.

“In sailing, you can spend 10 or 20 years of your life and still be competitive,” Peter says.

“That’s the beauty of the sport. And the Olympic creed isn’t to have won an Olympic medal; it is to have competed in the Olympics. That’s how I look at the Olympic trials. It’s not who wins the Olympic trials; it’s who competed.”

On the water, they operate like a single unit. Gerard, a three-time All-American and four-time national champion, usually takes the helm. Peter will typically serve as tactician and Paul the foredecker. But they each can fulfill any of the three roles.

“When I watch them, I think of a concert violinist,” says older brother Edward, a doctor who lives in Green Bay, Wis. “They work with such harmony. They’ve perfected it into an art form.”

Peter and Paul, 39 and single, are stockbrokers for firms in Manhattan. Peter lives in Greenwich, Conn., within miles of Paul’s apartment in Rye, N.Y.

Gerard, 38, a recently retired Navy officer, lives in Hampton, Va., with his wife, Sheri, and son, Ryan. He plans to take a teaching job this fall in the engineering department at Texas A&M; at Galveston, where he also will coach the sailing team.

At 6-foot-2, Peter and Paul are slightly taller than Gerard, but all three are slim and share the same fair hair and deep-set, sparkling blue eyes of their parents.

They seem more comfortable talking about the accomplishments of other family members, boasting of how oldest brother Arthur III swam the English Channel, or what a great cook their younger brother Gene has become.

“The whole family is close,” Cecilia says. “Everything just becomes a family project. And whatever they do, they go into wholeheartedly, with a lot of enthusiasm and talent.”

Not long ago, Peter brought his siblings together to paint the retirement home that Arthur and Cecilia bought in Connecticut’s Fairfield County, along the sound, where they would be closer to their roots and family.

But then Arthur collapsed.

At first, they thought it was a stroke. But days later, doctors diagnosed glioblastoma--a cancer with a high rate of growth, one of the most malignant and difficult to treat--and they said he might live four to six months.

Arthur and Cecilia now share a bedroom at the Shannon McCormack House in Boston, where patients at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute can live with their families. Arthur undergoes intensive chemotherapy; tests after his first six-week cycle showed the tumor had not grown.

The Coleman children have set up a rotation, taking turns traveling to Boston to ensure that two of them are always in the house.

Schedules posted on the mirror of their parents’ room are reminiscent of the ones on the refrigerator when the children were growing up: Gene washes the dishes. . . . Paul makes sure Arthur gets his medication every two hours. . . . Edward takes Arthur for a walk.

Gene, a fisherman who works off the Northeast coastline, is always there. Edward, David, Cecilia and Arthur III are there often. Peter, Paul and Gerard have squeezed in as many visits as they can.

“I am terribly proud,” their mother says. “I never had to say a word or ask for anything. They just came.”

She emphasized that the situation is not grim.

“Nobody’s morose by any means. This is a happy group to be with,” she says. “We’re enjoying being together, maybe even more now.”

Arthur certainly isn’t gloomy. “I don’t like what I have, but I’m going to win,” he says. The focus in this story, he says, should be his sons’ achievements and their quest for the gold.

But this man who once took a few of his 20 grandchildren hiking up New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington now has trouble with his balance and must be supported when he walks around.

So on the eve of his Olympic challenge, Paul helps his father walk. It is a moment that means more to him than any gold medal.

“For me to be able to hold my father’s hand and give him balance, when he’s been giving me balance my entire life, it’s an honor and a privilege,” he says. “It’s an experience of a lifetime.”