"When they told me I was having heart surgery, I thought it was the end. Checkmate."

Barcelona"I've always been very competitive, maybe too much so. So what's happened to me lately has been tough. It felt like it was the end of my career," explains Josep Betalú (Amposta, 1977), one of the biggest names in Catalan cycling. This mechanic, who knows how to do whatever it takes with his hands, has had his fill of winning races on four different continents since making the jump to mountain biking at the age of 30, in 2010. Before that, he had also done road cycling, in addition to a thousand other jobs, outside of DJing or fixing cars. Thanks to cycling, he has traveled the world and spent time in Costa Rica, where he is famous. "There, people looked at me with their eyes wide open, because I am the way I come from and I say what I think," he says.

A four-time champion of the Titan Desert in Morocco, as well as races like the Ruta de los Conquistadores in Costa Rica, Betalú was still winning races at 45. "At my age, road cycling is no longer a challenge, but mountain biking or riding Titan in the desert is different," explains the Amposta native, who has always pushed his body to the limit. He's always fearless, whether he's blazing trails himself with a machete in the Costa Rican jungle or in the dunes of the Sahara, where there's a risk of getting stuck in the sand and "it's hard to rest properly in the tents." after each stage." A lifestyle he enjoys, which is why he continued competing. But at the 2024 Titan Desert, everything changed. "I was coming off an injury that kept me out of competition for eight months. The race doctors had no doubts: I couldn't continue and would have to undergo surgery for arrhythmias.

All of this led Josep to a new situation in his life: he didn't have the courage to continue competing; he saw that he had reached the end of his career a year earlier than he had planned. Until he received a call from Melchor Mauri, the team where Betalú usually competes. "Melchor motivated me because I had no intention of ever competing again. In fact, I haven't competed since last year, since I left Titan. I'm used to always competing to win, and suddenly, everything changed for me. I had to lead the team to help others win. And well, that's really what motivated me."

For years, in KH-7, cyclists worked to help Betalú. quite solved. I am a person who does everything he does to the maximum. And if you don't do something to the maximum, you won't do it directly. And yes, it is true that the bicycle makes me feel happy. All these months that I have been without training, osters, have been hard. Something was missing. It will be nice to continue", from a man who has worked in the KH-7 team for a second time, since this team unites professionals who want to win with runners who are going to try to finish, like the brothers Sergio and Javier Torres, cooks at a restaurant with three Michelin stars, or athletes who are part of solidarity projects like this year's from the Guttmann Foundation or how Lester Fernández, the Cuban-born Catalan cyclist who competes with an 81% disability"The first year I competed with Lester on the team, I had a mechanical problem in the first stage and was struggling. I chatted with him that night and he helped me a lot; he made me feel lucky. The next day I won," recalls the Amposta native. Professionals learn from Betalú, but he learns from Lester.