Living in Peru : your everyday companion

At the age of 85, he returned to Peru with three gold medals from the World Masters Athletic Championships in Finland. This is the story of the “arequipeño” Hugo Delgado: 60 years as a doctor, 20 as an athlete.

Hugo Delgado chose discipline and an emphatic change in worldly habits in order to arrive at first place. He had trained his mind by studying medicine and psychiatry. Now it was time for his body. Athletics became the new path he would follow.

He remembers that his first race was when he was 13. He was trapped by the mechanics of his body, which he would later go on to study and learn to understand to perfection. Although he wanted to be an architect, economic problems and the fact that he was the nephew of Honorio Delgado pushed him to study medicine. If your uncle had visited Sigmund Freud and introduced psychoanalysis to South America, why wouldn’t you try to be like him? Because of this, after nine years of oppressive studies, he chose to specialize in psychiatry. There was no way to maintain his study of surgery and the books of Carl Jung with athletic competitions.

So athletics lost a role in his life, but he never let them completely disappear. As a professor, he sometimes raced his students, and he sometimes beat them too. Besides the total invasion of professional studies in his life, there was another reason for the postponement of sports. His material gains in psychiatry have only recently allowed him to finance his trips and the fees for international competitions. Although he has broken various records, no one wanted to support him financially. He has paid all of his participant fees for international competitions. From his first participation in the World Masters Athletic Championships until the most recent in Finland this year, he has always run and paid for everything himself. Delgado feels that his presence in the competition would not have been possible had he not studied medicine. In fact, his idea that athletics are a complement to life, could only recently be satisfied at the age of 65. “When one is old, one does what they could not do when they were young,” he assures.

However, long before destroying the competition in Lathy (Finland) with three gold medals and one silver, Delgado had to defend his decision with strength. Two months before his first World Championship, he gave up smoking. Before that day, he was a compulsive smoker, emptying a pack and a half into his lungs each day. He destroyed the withdrawal syndromes through athletic training and by changing his eating habits. Also, he sold his practice and a car in order to continue traveling and participating in competitions. He learned to fight loneliness and the impossibility of understanding other languages; Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, German and Greek were a few of the countries that he travel to, and always alone. He even lost races because he didn’t realize that they were calling him to compete in a strange language. Recently he has begun to enjoy the company of his grandchildren (he has six) and his daughters, who live outside of Peru. For Delgado, the point of each trip is to get there and return, the sooner the better. And, above all, win.

    “Why would you go if it isn’t to win?” he says. Although the World Masters Athletic Championships is much more recreational than competitive, Delgado wouldn’t imagine returning without a medal around his neck. And he will keep doing it until he tires. Which could be tomorrow, or it could be in five years, when he will turn 90 years old. So, he will continue to live without eating red meat, without smoking, without a personal trainer. He’ll keep treating patients and opening the gate to O’Higgins Park in front of his house every time he wants to train. Don Hugo always has done what he wanted to. He’s never asked for explanations from anyone. And, as they function together, he has always achieved what he has proposed for his body and his soul.