Former mountain-bike pro Claudio Caluori of Velosolutions is on a mission to get kids on bikes. But they don’t have to pedal; they pump. Pump their arms that is. Caluori’s 17-year-old Swiss company makes pump tracks. These undulating, curvaceous skate-park-like courses capped with smooth, speedy asphalt are kid-magnets. Kids—of all ages—propel themselves by “pumping” their arms on the bumps and rollers. Velosolutions has constructed more than 270 pump tracks around the world, most of them for commercial clients.

But Caluori’s latest venture is philanthropic: Pump for Peace installs pump tracks in parts of the world that either usually couldn’t afford them or where a community would benefit from the cohesion that—perhaps bizarrely—a pump track brings in its wake.

I spoke to him, via Zoom, in mid-May as he was installing one of several pump tracks in Israel. He had sent his employees back to Europe because of rocket attacks launched by Hamas fighters in Gaza. He stayed. He believes that pump tracks—with their jumps and banked turns—can build bridges.

“This is why I’m not running home, even if it gets a little loud here,” he said.

How can a short-course bicycle track have any chance of solving the multi-generational intractable problems in this most fractious part of the world, I asked.

“Our pump tracks are used by everyone, no matter the age, no matter where he or she comes from, no matter the skill level, no matter how poor or rich,” replied Caluori.

“People just mix and have fun together.”

Where diplomatic missions and peace conferences have failed, pump tracks can help bring warring communities together, added Caluori. Not overnight, of course, and not directly, but bonding on bicycles could bring dividends down the line, especially for communities that don’t traditionally mix and certainly don’t usually play together.

The Pump for Peace tracks he’s building in Israel are situated in residential schools known as Youth Villages. Kids in these agricultural educational communities often come from challenging backgrounds; some have learning disabilities.

The Youth Village concept was established in 1927 by Dr. Siegfried Lehman, an immigrant from Europe. The establishments—part-funded by the Israeli government—are open to all children, not just Jewish ones.

One of the pump tracks is at the Ramat Hadassah Youth Village, and I talked with Moran Betzer, the community’s general director.

“Sports in general, and bike riding specifically, can connect people and can make us a better society,” she said.

“Our village is multicultural. Tonight, we are celebrating Ramadan—the mother tongue of many of our children is Arabic. Many also speak Amharic, kids with Ethiopian backgrounds.”

Other Youth Villages have Druze kids and kids from Arab Christian areas of Israel.

The Pump for Peace tracks being installed in these villages were paid for via fundraising through the Bartali Youth in Movement program, a two-year-old NGO founded by former professional cyclist Ran Margaliot. The mercurial Margaliot was earlier the co-creator of the Israel Cycling Academy, a professional team now known as Israel Start-up Nation and which employs four-times Tour de France winner Chris Froome.

The Bartali Youth in Movement program, based out of the Ben Shemen Youth Village near Tel Aviv, has equal numbers of Druze kids, Jewish kids, and Arab kids.

In an Arab-language video, Addan, one of the program’s Arab youngsters, explains the concept to Lian, a young Arab woman from the Lower Galilee village of Sha’ab where a Bartali Youth in Movement center is to open soon.

“If the Bartali Youth in Movement [pump track program] was exclusive to just one one community, then we would not call it a Pump for Peace track,” said Caluori.

“Then they would just be a normal client, but since this track [we have built] will be accessible to anyone, it can be a Pump for Peace project—the Bartali foundation will also provide bikes so any kids can ride on it.”

Unlike soccer—which in Israel can be intensely partisan, with some teams attracting far-right supporters—bicycling isn’t political, said Bartali Youth Leadership’s director Eran Zohar.

“If I meet you in the mountains on my mountain bike, and you are wearing your helmet and your sunglasses, and I’ll be wearing mine, we’re equals. We would ride together and have a lot of fun together before we get to know who’s behind the helmet and the glasses. That’s a huge tool for us because we are taking kids from all sides of Israeli society.”

The four pump tracks Caluori has either built or is building in Israel are, like all his pump tracks, all-weather facilities. They’re also compact, smaller than baseball or soccer fields.

Swiss national Caluori got into bicycling via his first sport, hockey.

“My parents bought me a mountain bike at 15 so I could get to hockey training, rather than have them drive me every day. That was really cool: so cool that cycling became more interesting than the hockey.”

He became a cross-country mountain bike racer, then switched to downhill racing, winning seven Swiss national championships between 1999 and 2005. In 2002, he placed fourth in the UCI World Cup in Mont Sainte Anne, Canada.

After he retired from competition, Caluori founded and managed the Scott Velosolutions professional mountain bike race team, and from 2009, started laying out trails in bike parks and built his first pump track, made from mud. When, in 2012, he capped one of his early creations with asphalt, his order book exploded.

“No matter where you are, whether that’s in a rich country, or in a poor one, [pump tracks] always have the same effect,” said Caluori, “people of all ages, of all backgrounds, of all beliefs, whatever skin color, they get together, and they have fun.”

But at $212 per square meter for an average of 1,000 square meters, pump tracks from Velosolutions are out of reach of those communities which probably would most benefit from them.

“We thought, you know what, we need to make this possible in places where they cannot afford it,” Caluori said.

“Or,” he added, “for places where it’s sketchy, like war zones. That’s where kids need it even more.”

A town in Lesotho was the first to benefit from a Pump for Peace track, but the idea originated in Asia.

“We were building a track for a wealthy client in Thailand, at the Cambodian border, right in front of a poor village,” remembered Caluori.

“It was like a little slum, and I felt bad building this track, not knowing if these village kids will ever be able to use it. When we poured out the last wheelbarrow of asphalt, all these kids from the slum ran to the pump track with whatever they had, an old broken skateboard or a rusty bike, or even just a wheel to run around with. And they would not leave. They were just riding and riding and riding and riding. And I had tears in my eyes. And I knew we had to make this possible all around the world.”