'The love of cycling has to be shared.'

Interview Kurt Caboor: cycling enthusiast at heart and owner of bike rental company Alta Bike Rental.

There are people for whom cycling is a destination. A life destination. And we are not talking about the pros we see whizzing down the road from Omloop to Lombardy in platoons, breakaways, sprints or a long breakaway. We are talking about the hidden heroes and heroines. The woman who teaches cycling to immigrants. The mechanic on a pro team. The man who started a bike cafe. The bicycle policy advisor at a province. Cycling is in their blood. For them, life is a race. Whatever steel steed is in their stable, they breathe cycling. From city bikes to duo bikes and from balance bikes to racers and mountain bikes. 

In this series, we interview people for whom cycling is their destination. In other words, Cycling is their Destination.

We kick off with Belgian Kurt Caboor, founder and owner of the Costa Blanca's premier bike rental company: Alta Bike Rental. 

Bike rental and go for miles with the pros

With deft, determined actions, he assembles a wheel in no time, or replaces a snapped spoke. When Kurt comes to deliver his fire-engine red Wilier rental bikes, he works fast. There is little time for small talk, because he wants to get on with it. Because when the work is done, this former promising rider gets on the bike himself. After moving from Belgium to Spain in 2018, Kurt will cycle at least 20,000 kilometres a year in the Marina Alta from 2019. There is no climb here he does not know, there are no altimeters he has not devoured. Often he takes female pro riders here in tow. Shirin van Anrooij, Fem van Empel, Floortje Mackay, Lorena Wiebes, Lucinda Brand, Ellen van Dijk. They have all cycled with him. And occasionally Kurt rents bikes to the partners of these pros.

Kurt is not only the founder and owner of Alta Bike Rental, he is also the only employee at the same time: 'I do everything myself, which also means that a few times a year I am polishing bikes until two in the morning. But I don't mind that. Let me do my thing, I like to do it the way I do it. And I think: it's better to be big in small things, than small in big things. Alta Bike Rental is not just mine. It is me.' 

Promises, carnival races and Gran Fondo's

If his life had turned out differently, he might have become a professional cyclist himself. Kurt was born in 1980, the same year as Tom Boonen: 'I was good, but I was no Tom Boonen,' he laughs. From the age of 11 to 20, he competed in cycling at a competitive level. But then he fell ill. Glandular fever, better known in the Netherlands as Pfeiffer's disease. Kurt stops racing. 'For ten years I didn't even have a bike.' He finally picks up the thread in 2010 and starts riding races for the Belgian Nevenbonden. That tastes like more, and the fairground races become Gran Fondos. 

When Kurt does something, he does it well: 'I've always been serious about it,' he says glistening. 'In my first Marmotte, I started somewhere at the back of the field of about 7,500 participants. On top of the Col du Glandon, I was already overtaking people who had started 50 minutes earlier. In the end I finished something like 60th.' 

Sharing a love of cycling

That love of cycling is something Kurt wants to share, because, "If you can't share, you can't multiply. This leads him to guide cycling holidays and training camps of groups of friends. From the Atomium in Brussels to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. To the French Alps. And to the Spanish Costa Blanca. And there he finally falls in love. In love with the Jalon Valley. When he leaves there in 2017 after a holiday, the feeling creeps over him: 'I am leaving my home here.' 

In 2018, things are falling in the right direction for Kurt in a number of defining events. The sunny side, you might say, as he prefers it to be "ten degrees too hot than ten degrees too cold. Event one is that he meets trainer/coach Cornelle Sterk during a Life Coaching course. Event two: Kurt is in Rotterdam when he gets a call from the hotelier in the French Alps: 'There is still far too much snow here, you can't come to training camp here with your clients.' Suddenly, in a ram-packed, busy schedule, there is an empty week. 'What now?', Kurt thinks. And the same day, he calls Cornelle: 'I think I'll just go to Spain for a week, by myself.' Turns out Cornelle is also in Spain and a few days later they are standing together at the edge of a pool at a house in Lliber that is for sale. 

Going for it full throttle 

Event three. Cornelle has Kurt do an exercise there. Out loud, Kurt asks: 'Is it predestined that I live here?' And he feels in everything that the answer to that question is 'yes'. He asks another question: 'Is it destined for me to live in Belgium for the rest of my life?' And Kurt immediately feels that the answer to that question is 'no'. That moment is decisive, because when he returns to Belgium after that week, the first thing he says to his girlfriend is: 'Now we just have to do it.' 'I started laughing and never stopped. From then on, we went full steam ahead. That was in May 2018, and by November we were living here. The fact that I had the confidence in myself to make that choice was definitely due to the good conversations I had with Cornelle. I am very grateful to her for that.'

Girlfriend Maaike finds her way in Property Management. Five-year-old son Myco soon speaks better Spanish than his parents. And Kurt initially continues guiding cyclists. But with Garmin and Strava competing, guiding is increasingly difficult to make money from. And the bikes he rents, "there was always something wrong with them. And then another decisive event followed. Pieter, one of Kurt's best friends who is a bicycle mechanic in Belgium, comes to visit in January 2019. He introduces Kurt to the idea of renting bikes himself, and offers him that he can buy 20 bikes at purchase price: 'If you do it, you have to do it right.' 

Bike rental adventure

That's where the bike-rental adventure begins. In April 2019, Kurt buys his first bikes, and the first bikes are rented out in early August. Meanwhile, Kurt has around eighty bikes on display. He stands for high service and high quality. 'Alta means high, so that name fits perfectly. Besides, it is the name of this region: the Marina Alta.' Kurt has no physical shop, but brings the bikes to your home, and also picks them up again at the end of the rental period. Because he handles the transport himself, there is less chance of damage. 

Kurt runs his bike rental with heart and soul: 'If I start doing something against my will, I stop. But I always prefer doing Altabikes. I do take care of it. And I enjoy it.' The fact that the rental business is doing so well does mean that he doesn't have as much time for guidance anymore. Also because he prefers to spend those free hours getting on his bike himself. Sometimes alone. And sometimes, therefore, with special cycling buddies. From Fem van Empel ('That one was born of magic potion! When she does blocks on the Coll de Rates, I can just keep up with her.') to Lieuwe Westra. And as is the case in the mountainous surroundings of Jalón, the road in Kurt's life sometimes goes up, and sometimes down. There are peaks, and there are valleys.

Peaks and troughs

As the sun almost sinks behind the mountains and his eyes turn bright blue, Kurt says: 'The time you have here, you have to enjoy it. With me, positivity prevails, but I have also encountered certain things that brought me back.' One of those things is the loss of his cycling comrade Lieuwe Westra. As 'the four musketeers', Kurt, together with Lieuwe and two other mates, racked up a lot of cycling kilometres in this environment. With peaks, but also with deep valleys. For instance, during one of those rides, in late December 2021, they witnessed together the serious fall of pro rider Amy Pieters. 'She fell here at the little bridge,' Kurt says, and you can see how it still affects him. He is silent for a moment.

Then he tells of a memorable climb of La Fustera, just outside Benissa together with Swiss former pro Alex Zülle: 'Alex came cycling and Lieuwe called me: 'Kurt, we're going to test it on Fustera. I'm going full Fustera, I'm going for a PR!' And so we did. 'On La Fustera, Lieuwe sprinted away. He went full attack. Alex looked at me in surprise: 'Kurt, what are they going to do? In the end we also pedalled hard and we reached the top together. I had a PR, by the way. Lieuwe was really pissed about that. 

'The last bike ride he did here in Spain, before he went back to the Netherlands for good, he rode a PR at La Fustera. On 5 May he got on a plane back home, and then we lost contact. We never saw him again. We lived in fear for seven months. Actually, we lost him twice.' 

Kurt tells it with a grin, but behind it you can see sadness: 'I gave up on Lieuwe. I had a nasty gut feeling about it for months. 'k would have preferred an app from him now: Come Kurt, we're going for a ride.' Yet Kurt continues to look at the sunny side above all: 'Because what I very much believe in, you can't control everything but you can control yourself. So for me, positivity prevails and I look at: what can I learn from this myself.' And for Kurt, that means enjoying as much as possible. Of his girlfriend and his beautiful son, of the Spanish sun, and of all those beautiful rides on the bike.