Perico Delgado presented a few days ago 'La soledad de Perico', the book he has written with the journalist Ainara Hernando and in which he reviews the main moments of his life. In an interview with the colleagues of the newspaper El Mundo, the Tour de France winner talks about his career and what it means to be a cyclist.
The former star of world cycling in the 1980s who has been the voice of cycling on Spanish television for more than thirty years believes that cycling is a sport of "defeated riders": "In sport, you compete to win. But, if you think about it, we are big losers. I did almost 2,000 races as a pro and only won 39. I'm a fucking loser, a clumsy guy. The good thing the pro world teaches you is that even if you don't win, the world goes on. And you have to learn from that.
Perico talks about the importance of teaching children that, even if they win a lot and soon, that doesn't guarantee success and that in life you learn more from defeats than from victories: "If you win too soon and too much, you don't know how to value the importance of the process to win: the training, the effort, the frustration.... Losing teaches you much more than winning. And we don't educate the kids enough about it."
"The kids learn to make the victory gesture [he points to his back with his thumbs like Cristiano], but then they are not aware that you have to put in the hours, that you have to train, that the team is key, all of that. You can be very good, but you also compete with other very good players. It's all a mental issue. The difference is in the work.
On the differences between "his" cycling and cycling now, Perico comments that before it was all more human and now everything has become more predetermined and much less fun than in his time: "Cycling has always been individual, but now they have become automatons. I used to talk to everyone in a peloton. Now there's no more talking."
"The coexistence in the race is nil. It wasn't like that before. My cycling was more fun. It was you and your circumstances, you had to interpret everything because the director wasn't with you? Now you have the earpiece, the big data, the nutritionist? You used to become a cyclist because you liked the race, the competition. Today it's a killer. You don't enjoy it the same way," he concluded.
