‘The love for cycling should be shared.’

Interview with Kurt Caboor: a cycling enthusiast with a passion for the sport and owner of the bike rental company Alta Bike Rental.

There are people for whom cycling is a destination. A life-long passion. And we’re not talking about the pros we see frolicking from Omloop to Lombardy in pelotons, breakaway groups, sprints, or a long road race. We’re talking about the hidden heroes and heroines. The woman who teaches cycling to immigrants. The mechanic for a professional team. The man who started a bike café. The policy advisor for cycling at a province. Cycling is in their blood. For them, life is a race. No matter what kind of steel frame they have in their stables, they breathe cycling. From the city bike to the duathlon bike and from the recumbent bike to the racer and mountain bike. 

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

We start with the Belgian Kurt Caboor, founder and owner of the Costa Blanca's number one bike rental company: Alta Bike Rental. 

Bike rental and kilometers eaten up with the pros

With deft, determined actions, he can assemble a wheel in no time, or replace a cracked rim. When Kurt arrives with his fire-red Wilier rental bike, he works quickly. There is little time for small talk, because he wants to get on with it. Because when the work is done, this former promise himself gets on the bike. After moving from Belgium to Spain in 2018, Kurt rides at least 20,000 kilometers per year in the Marina Alta. There is no climb he doesn’t know, no elevation meter he hasn’t conquered. Often he takes female pro riders along on this journey. Shirin van Anrooij, Fem van Empel, Floortje Mackay, Lorena Wiebes, Lucinda Brand, Ellen van Dijk. They have all ridden with him. And from time to time, 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: ‘I do everything myself; that also means that I bike for up to two hours a night a few times a year to clean up. But I don’t mind that. Let me do my thing; I like doing it the way I do it. And I think: you’d better be great at small things than small at big things. Alta Bike Rental is not just mine; it’s me.’ 

Promises, fair races and Gran Fondos

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 wasn’t Tom Boonen,’ he laughs. From his eleventh to his twentieth birthday, he competed at a competitive level in cycling. But then he got sick. Kleerkoorts, better known in the Netherlands as Pfeiffer’s disease. Kurt stopped racing. ‘For ten years, I didn’t even own a bike.’ Eventually, he picked up the pace again in 2010 and started racing for the Belgian cycling associations. That was just the beginning, and the road races became Gran Fondos. 

When Kurt does something, he does it well: ‘I’ve always been serious about it,’ he says gleefully. ‘In my first Marmotte, I started somewhere at the back of the field with about 7,500 participants. On top of the Col du Glandon, I already had people starting just fifty minutes earlier. In the end, I came in something like sixtyth place.’ 

Sharing a love for cycling

Kurt wants to share that love for cycling because: ‘If you can’t share, you can’t multiply.’ This leads him to start guiding cycling holidays and training camps for 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 it is there that he finally falls in love. In love with the Jalon Valley. When he leaves there in 2017 after a vacation, he feels: ‘I’m leaving my home here.’ 

In 2018, Kurt experiences a number of defining events that turn things in his favor. The sunny side, you might say, because he prefers ‘ten degrees too warm than ten degrees too cold.’ Event one is when he meets trainer/coach Cornelle Sterk during a Life Coaching training course. Event two: Kurt is in Rotterdam when he is called by the hotelier in the French Alps: ‘There’s still too much snow here, you can’t come here on a training camp with your clients.’ Suddenly, in a packed, busy schedule, there’s a week of free time. ‘What now?’ thinks Kurt. And the same day he calls Cornelle: ‘I think I’ll only go to Spain for a week, on my own.’ Cornelle turns out to be in Spain too, and a few days later they stand together at the edge of a pool near a house in Lliber that is for sale. 

Going in with full gas 

Event three. Cornelle has Kurt do an exercise there. He asks Kurt out loud: ‘Is it predestined that I live here?’ And he feels in everything that the answer to that question is ‘yes’. He asks the next question: ‘Is it intended that I stay 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 haven’t stopped since. From then on, we’ve been all in. That was in May 2018, and in November we lived here. The fact that I had the confidence in myself to make that choice is definitely thanks to the good conversations I had with Cornelle. I am very grateful to her for that.’

Friend Maaike finds her way into Property Management. Her five-year-old son Myco speaks Spanish much better than his parents. And Kurt initially continues to guide cyclists. But with Garmin and Strava as competitors, guiding is becoming increasingly difficult to make money from. And the bikes he rents, ‘there was always something wrong with them.’ Then a decisive event follows. Pieter, one of Kurt’s best friends who is a bike mechanic in Belgium, visits in January 2019. He gives Kurt the idea to start renting out bikes himself, and offers him the chance to buy twenty bikes at the purchase price: ‘If you do it, you have to do it well.’ 

Cycling rental adventure

That’s where the bike rental adventure begins. In April 2019, Kurt bought his first bikes, and in early August the first bikes were rented out. By now, Kurt has about eighty bikes. He stands for high service and high quality. ‘Alta means high, so that name fits perfectly. Moreover, it’s the name of this region: the Marina Alta.’ Kurt doesn’t have a physical shop, but delivers the bikes to your home, and also picks them up at the end of the rental period. Because he provides the transportation himself, the risk of damage is lower. 

Kurt runs his bike rental with all his heart: ‘If I start doing something against my will, I stop doing it. But I always prefer to do Altabikes. I take care of it myself. And I enjoy it.’ The fact that things are going so well with the rental means that he doesn’t have as much time for guidance anymore. Partly because he prefers to get on his bike himself during his free time. Sometimes alone. And sometimes with unusual bike sizes. From Fem van Empel (‘That one was born from magic! When she does those blocks on the Coll de Rates, I can still follow her a little bit.’) to Lieuwe Westra. And just as that is the case in the mountainous surroundings of Jalón, the road in Kurt’s life also sometimes goes up, and sometimes down. There are peaks, and there are valleys.

Peaks and valleys

As the sun sets behind the mountains and his eyes turn a deep blue, Kurt tells us about it: ‘The time you spend here, you have to enjoy it. For me, the positivity prevails, but I also encountered certain things that brought me back.’ One of those things is the loss of his cycling buddy Lieuwe Westra. As ‘the four musketeers’, Kurt and Lieuwe and two other companions made a lot of cycling kilometers in this environment. With peaks, but also with deep valleys. So during one of those rides, at the end of December 2021, they witnessed the serious fall of professional cyclist Amy Pieters together. ‘She fell down the bridge here,’ Kurt says, and you can see how it still hurts him. He is silent for a moment.

Then he talks about a memorable climb of La Fustera, just outside Benissa together with the Swiss former pro Alex Zülle: ‘Alex came cycling and Lieuwe called me: ‘Kurt, we’re going to test him on Fustera. I’m going full speed on Fustera, I’m going for a PR!‘ And so it was done. ’On La Fustera, Lieuwe sprinted away. He went full speed ahead. Alex looked at me in surprise: ‘Kurt, what are they going to do? In the end, we also kicked hard and we came together on top. I even managed to set a new record. Lieuwe was pretty pissed about that.’ 

‘The last bike ride he made here in Spain, before he finally went back to the Netherlands, was a PR on La Fustera. On May 5, he got on the 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 smile, but behind it you see sadness: ‘I gave up Lieuwe. I had a very bad feeling about it for months.‘ I would have preferred to have a text from him now: ‘Come Kurt, let’s go for a ride.’ Yet Kurt mainly looks to the sunny side: ‘Because where I really believe strongly, you don’t have everything under control but you do have control over yourself. So positivity has the upper hand and I look at it this way: what can I learn from this myself?’ And that means for Kurt to enjoy as much as possible. Of his girlfriend and his beautiful son, of the Spanish sun, and of all those beautiful rides on the bike.