The man known as the Silver Bullet was almost unstoppable from the moment he began his Paralympic campaign in Tokyo. Hug swept four gold medals, including the marathon title he already owned from Rio in 2016.
He went on to win easily at the BMW BERLIN-MARATHON in September of 2021 and added London seven days later, before losing a narrow tussle with Romanchuk in Chicago.
24 hours later Hug blasted his way to first place in Boston, and was equally as dominant in New York City to put the seal on the series. He rounded his year off by breaking the world record at the Oita International Marathon. Hug’s time of 1:17:47 smashed the previous mark of 1:20:14 which had been held by his compatriot Heinz Frei for 22 years.
Hug has been competing at the top of wheelchair marathon racing for more than a decade and has appeared at four Paralympic Games, first in Athens in 2004 where he won two bronze medals on the track. He has 12 medals in all, six of them gold.
His Majors career took off in 2011 with his first victory in Berlin, and when the wheelchair athletes joined the open division athletes in AbbottWMM Series X, Hug won the first two series, finishing second behind Romanchuk in Series XII and regaining his title in 2021.