Pedro Delgado, Un Tour (1988) and dos Vueltas (1985 and 1989) contemplate it, He has just published his fourth book entitled ‘La Soledad de Perico’ (Espasa). He has had the collaboration of the Basque journalist Ainara Hernando. On April 5 it went on sale. And this Saturday, Perico turns 63.
What has been Perico’s loneliness?
The question forces you to reflect because many times when you compete you are not really alone or physically ill. But the truth is that both in the society in which we live and cycling up a mountain pass you can be surrounded by fans, but you feel alone. Loneliness is what appears in full effort against your rivals and, even if you are covered, after all, you are living a solo effort against yourself.
However, there is a team that advises, that helps.
Yes, but you have to live reality and realize that many times we make an individual effort and that we find ourselves very alone.
The question about loneliness is given because that is the title of his latest book.
This is my fourth book. The first, published after I retired in 1994, was biographical, with anecdotes; where I grew up, that I had won… until the moment of goodbye. The second dealt with my experience as a TVE commentator and how cycling was experienced from the other side of the competition. Later, with the rise of the bike, I wrote about cycling routes. This room is different. I had a noise in my head for four or five years. Already then I spoke with Ainara Hernando and I suggested that she collaborate with me because I liked her style of writing. The pandemic and other professional and personal circumstances paralyzed the project until Planeta took heart and last year Ainara and I got our act together.
In other words, it is a different book from the previous ones.
Indeed, in ‘La soledad de Perico’ I wanted to tell more personal things and with more feeling towards a cycling that has gone down in history and because sometimes many athletes live with dissatisfaction. It is a more emotional than sports book, which was what I had been waiting for in my first biography.
You won a Tour and two Vueltas, does the book analyze key moments of those victories?
In 1985 I won my first Vuelta and I analyze the key moment of that victory when in the penultimate stage the unforeseen happened when I escaped. In fact, I was going to win the stage alone and then I find myself with the victory in the race. I am alone, I make decisions and risks, how I handle the situation with the hope of continuing to test it until the penultimate day when the opportunity arises. I’m talking about self-esteem, self-control.
Is it then a review of your personal life in the different episodes between your sporting successes?
I explain how I handled the key moments in my victories, in the 1988 Tour, which I won, but I also review the saddest moments of my career, such as when I had to abandon the 1986 Tour due to the death of my mother. Or how I suddenly disappear as the most important cyclist in Spain because another rider emerges who is stronger than me, named Miguel Induráin, and who forces us to start living the relay.
There is another key moment in his career: Luxembourg, exiting the 1989 Tour, gets lost in the streets and arrives late at the start ramp of the time trial.
That was different from the misfortune of my mother’s death, which was a sad circumstance that she cannot control. Luxembourg was a situation that I handled badly. At first I did not give importance to the 2.50 minutes that I lost after getting lost in the streets. I thought I could get that time back. I got into a hole that I couldn’t get out of and suddenly,
Can today’s athletes feel reflected in this book?
Any highly competitive athlete is going to find conflicting feelings: I work more than ever and I can’t find an answer in the result, I don’t know what’s wrong with me and I’m in a hole. Live experiences similar to mine. And that I was lucky to win. But as I explain in the book, you feel lonely no matter how much affection people give you.
It seems that athletes now have it easier than 40 years ago.
Today everything is easier. If we focus on cycling, we see for example that there are better bikes. Cyclists grow up surrounded by advisers and don’t come from starvation like they did in my day. They have preparers everywhere and many more tools to use. But he is still an athlete who competes alone against his rivals. Although times are very different, I think this book can help kids understand that no matter how many advisers tell them what to do, the secret to winning is in themselves and in the attitude they take in life.
To those who knew him and saw him succeed from the sofa or the gutter, what does the book say?
It will serve to remove the memory. To remember the cycling of espadrilles and those Spanish runners who opened an international gap for us to proudly leave a legacy at the highest level, of the cyclists who went from starvation to the top of the sport. And they will also hallucinate with childhood memories, which my children now laugh at, like the first time in 1972 that I visited El Corte Inglés and what I hallucinated with the escalators that I had never seen.