Post by Bozur on Mar 2, 2008 16:15:47 GMT -5
A Sports Mecca (Pardon the Expression)
Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The help: Imported workers at Dubailand.
By ED ZUCKERMAN
Published: March 2, 2008
Race-camel handlers run for their lives.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The English cricket star Andrew Flintoff inaugurates the Ernie Els course.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
A falcon-athlete is chauffered to its event.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
Fresh powder and a T.G.I. Friday's: Alpine charm at Ski Dubai, mere steps away from the food court.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The hype: Ernie Els (in apron) tends to Martina Navratilova and guests at a publicity event for his new course.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
An oasis of delight: The Dubai Motor City fleshpots.
Never mind that they were in the middle of a desert. The grains of sand all around them, microscopically speaking, were too round. Perfect sand traps require angular sand (so that golf balls don’t stick in trap walls but roll to the bottom); angular sand was located and ordered from Saudi Arabia, next door. Trucks were loaded, but they were turned back at the border. For reasons unclear, Saudi Arabia wanted to hold on to that sand. So the builders of the Els Club golf course at Dubai Sports City, a vast sports complex now rising in the round-sand desert, had to settle for their second-choice sand — also from Saudi Arabia, but of a type the Saudis were willing to export.
It was the only time they settled for second choice in anything.
“Our dedication to providing the best that is available and partnering with excellence is borne out in everything we do,” declares Khalid Abdulrahim Mohammed al-Zarooni, a prominent Dubai businessman and graduate of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who is the president of Dubai Sports City. Nearing completion on the 50-million-square-foot grounds are a 25,000-seat, state-of-the-art cricket stadium; a 60,000-seat stadium for soccer and rugby; an indoor arena for ice hockey and concerts; a field-hockey venue; a tennis academy; and a Manchester United soccer school. More than 900 villas and town houses — “one of the most luxurious and advanced communities in the world” — are under construction on the fringes of the golf course, to be marketed to Western expats and as vacation homes for rich Middle Easterners (Iran is just 100 miles away). Planned are additional homes and apartments to house 65,000 people, a hospital specializing in sports medicine, a kilometer-long canal and a 230-store shopping mall with “one of the most sensational food courts ever built.”
All of which makes Dubai Sports City, in Dubai terms, a fairly modest endeavor. It’s part of a larger building project called Dubailand that will feature Motor City; Dubai Lifestyle City; Islamic Culture and Science World; and a residential development anchored by replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Most of that is still on the drawing board, eventually to join the dozens of brand-new skyscrapers along Sheik Zayed Road, a 12-lane highway perpetually congested with Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers. Towering above them all is the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building (currently at 159 stories — 1,985 feet — and rising higher, headed toward a final height that remains a secret). From the window of my hotel room in Dubai Media City, I could see 14 new high-rise towers and 24 others under construction. One of those recently completed was a 53-story copy of the Chrysler Building. Next to it was another 53-story copy of the Chrysler Building.
What Dubai once was is still visible in a downtown commercial district filled with low-rise shops and crowds of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and native Emiratis mingling in every conceivable variety of robe and headdress, where amplified calls to prayer send men running past the Hip Hop clothing emporium and a block of auto-parts stores to shuck their shoes and dash into a washroom marked “The Toilet Only for Muslims” before heading into a mosque to pray. New Dubai has been constructed in what used to be empty desert outside town, in accordance with the frequently cited vision of His Highness Sheik Mohammad Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai. (That is “ruler” in the sense of no political parties and no real elections, so much nicer than being a mere “decider.”) Sheik Mohammad dreams of using his little country’s billions of oil dollars to turn it into a cross between Singapore, Miami Beach and Las Vegas before the oil runs out. Building the biggest and best of everything has included making the place a world sports Mecca. You should pardon the expression.
A few days before I arrived in late January, the world’s richest marathon was run along Dubai’s Persian Gulf shore. Coming this month is the world’s richest horse race. Next year, the world’s richest golf tournament will debut, a bookend to the annual Dubai Desert Classic that Tiger Woods won (for the second time) a few days after I left. Woods has been a regular in Dubai, possibly tempted by the $3 million he reportedly gets from the Desert Classic just for showing up. He is currently building the world’s first Tiger Woods golf course, in Dubailand.
“With a potential reach of two billion spectators within a four-hour flight zone . . . the U.A.E. is geographically positioned to be a major hub for sporting events,” explains the literature for Dubai Sports City. Plans are to host an annual “flagship” event in each of six sports: soccer, rugby, tennis, golf, field hockey and cricket. Dubai Sports City is spending a million dirhams ($270,000) to import 940 tons of soil from England, Pakistan and Australia for its practice cricket pitches, so teams heading to international matches can rehearse on the surfaces they will be playing on. Dubai has already made a major cricket score, persuading the International Cricket Council to abandon its headquarters at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London after nearly a century and move to Dubai Sports City. The inducements were proximity to the cricket-playing countries of Asia and substantial tax breaks. There are no taxes in Dubai.
For those not seduced by an imitation-Australian cricket pitch, Dubai offers other lures — white-sand beaches, a half-dozen new golf courses, an Autodrome for Grand Prix races, name-chef restaurants, absurdly luxurious hotels and spas and an active disco and bar scene in those hotels (which are exempt from the Islamic ban on alcoholic beverages). Roger Federer has a home in Dubai, and other Western tourists and celebrities are turning up. In January alone, Elton John gave a concert in Abu Dhabi, just down the road; Bill Gates flew in to announce a partnership with the Dubai School of Government; and George W. Bush stopped by for lunch and a tour. George Clooney and Sharon Stone made appearances during the Dubai International Film Festival in December, and Shrek is on his way — a Dreamworks Animation theme park has just been announced for Dubailand.
If all that sounds slightly manufactured, it is. Witness Ski Dubai, an indoor ski mountain attached to one of the city’s mammoth shopping malls. You walk by a food court and turn right to reach the ticket area, where you pay 150 dirhams ($40) for two hours. The price includes equipment rental (skis, boots, parka and snow pants), disposable socks and accident insurance. Then you take an escalator up to a revolving door that leads to . . . a ski village. There’s a bunny slope, a snow park with tubes, a miniluge for the kids and a chairlift to the top of a 1,300-foot run with a 200-foot drop. There’s also the overcautious attitude of people who aren’t used to skiing. An attendant at the chair’s midstation chided me for not having my safety bar down; moments later an attendant at the top chided me for lifting it five feet too soon.
But it’s not a bad little hill: packed powder, no wind. If anything could be improved, it’s the quality of the light, which is flat and blue, reflected off blue walls and ceiling. One run, with a sharp dip at midpoint, is promoted as the world’s first indoor black-diamond run. It’s an easy black run, though — which, of course, is not good enough for Dubai. Dubailand has plans for an indoor ski dome with a revolving slope and artificial mountain range. And penguins. Still, I found penguinless Ski Dubai a pleasant enough respite from the other incongruities of this place. I got on the lift next to a 12-year-old boy with a snowboard and asked him where he was from.
“Palestine,” he said.
He took my surprise as confusion.
“Did you hear of it?” he asked.
Yeah, I said, I’d heard of it. This was the same week half the population of Gaza had broken down a wall into Egypt so they could buy gasoline and soap.
“We are living in Dubai,” the boy said, “but we are moving to Canada soon.”
Better snowboarding there, I said.
He nodded and pointed to a jump on the slope beneath us that was closed, to his disappointment. “It is only open sometimes,” he said. “In Canada, it will always be open.” Then our chair reached the top, and he jumped on his board and took off like a shot, straight down.
The man with the falcon didn’t ski. Or golf. Or play tennis. He was an Emirati engaged in an Emirati sport. Who cared about the two billion spectators? He had his bird.
I had driven out from the city, beyond the endless construction, past signs promising future construction (“Your Spanish Lifestyle Villas!”) and into the desert, where 50 or so four-wheel-drive S.U.V.’s were parked for the al-Fazza Falcon Hunting Championship and 50 or so men were waiting for their falcons’ turn to fly.
The men (with a few boys, no women) were all Emiratis. This was, in fact, the first time since arriving in Dubai that I’d been in a group where local citizens were a majority. Emiratis comprise less than 20 percent of Dubai’s 1.4 million residents. The rest are foreign workers, ranging from the middle-management Brits and Americans and Australians who run Dubai Sports City to hundreds of thousands of Indians and Pakistanis who labor on construction sites and at the ends of their long workdays are bused directly to compounds in the desert. The outnumbered Emiratis have one solace — they own the place.
This particular group of Emiratis, however, did not own all the falcons on their arms. Many were falcon tenders in the service of the ruling family, whose members take falconry extremely seriously (when President George W. Bush visited, he was photographed holding a royal falcon) and who owned a substantial percentage of the birds in the competition. One of those was Barraqy, a brown and white gyr-peregrine hybrid with an evil glare that perched on the wrist of the man sitting on the sand beside a Land Rover. He offered me a snack of sweet dates and watery Arabic coffee and showed me Barraqy’s passport (yes, passport; did I mention that falconry is taken seriously here?). The document identified the bird’s owner as “H. H. Shk. Mohammad R. al-Maktoum.” Barraqy is worth 150,000 dirhams ($40,000), the man said, but he discreetly avoided answering when I asked how many falcons the ruler owns. So did Dr. Mariam Hampel, a German veterinarian at the competition, who told me she works at Sheik Mohammad’s private falcon hospital, where she sees 30 to 40 birds a day. “They are very sensitive to fungal diseases,” she said, “and parasitic diseases. And they get bone fractures. I have to pin —”
“Dottora!”
Dr. Hampel was interrupted by a man in a white dishdasha standing by a temporary fabric fence. A falcon had just been taken behind the fence to begin its flight (the fence serving to shield it from visual distractions), and it was Dr. Hampel’s job to scan the bird with a hand-held device that would read a microchip implanted in its chest and confirm its identity. She did so, and the falcon was released. Some 400 yards away, a trainer was swinging a feathered lure, a crude imitation of the flight of a bird that a falcon would ordinarily hunt and kill. The falcon spotted it and flew off, straight and low, to strike the lure and be rewarded with a hunk of raw meat. The bird’s time was captured by a laser meter and the results posted on a computer monitor near the starting line, where the men gathered to watch. They chewed dates and talked on cell phones. As newcomers arrived, friends greeted friends in traditional Emirati fashion by leaning toward each other and bumping noses.
Is that Martina? I look again and yes, it is. Martina Navratilova is sitting in the front row of the press conference at Dubai Sports City next to a soccer player, a rugby player and a cricketer, all of whom I, being American, have never heard of but who are apparently world-famous. They have all turned up to support their good friend Ernie Els (currently ranked the fourth-best golfer on Earth and someone I have heard of) as he presides over the grand opening of the Els Club golf course, which he designed and which is the first athletic facility to be completed at Dubai Sports City. Els, in navy slacks and powder blue golf shirt, is seated on the dais between two Emiratis in dishdashas. He says he is thrilled to be here. “I’ve been coming to Dubai since 1993, and I’ve always wanted to build something in Dubai, and, luckily enough for our company, with Khalid we struck up a relationship” — he nods toward al-Zarooni, the president of Dubai Sports City — “and here we are.”
Building this course, he acknowledges, was not without challenges. “The sand would keep moving. I mean . . . you try to put a bunker in place, and overnight there’s a bit of a breeze, and the bunker has moved. So we had to really work quickly. If we worked on a particular hole we had to try to finish what we started.”
Plus there was the time he came for a visit in the summer and it was 117 degrees. He lasted half an hour outside.
It is pleasantly cool on the terrace of the temporary clubhouse where the international golf press devours a buffet lunch. This is the desert winter, with temperatures around 70 and occasional rain. The course looks stunning — intense green against the brown sand. To keep it green, the course is pock-marked with 2,256 sprinkler heads capable of delivering two million gallons of water every 12 hours.
Martina Navratilova — who, I’m told by an official of Dubai Sports City, might get involved with a new tennis academy here — is taking a few swings on the practice range. She’s soon joined by the other athletic guests of honor (for the record: the soccer goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, the cricketer Andrew Flintoff and the South African rugby star John Smit). Greg Letsche, one of Els’s designers, is standing nearby, looking with quiet satisfaction at the contours of the course. “Basically, you’re creating 18 holes out of a virtually flat surface,” he says. “Sometimes you like a lonely oak tree or a stream to give you some inspiration to begin with.” At Dubai Sports City, he had none of that. “It was a blank palette. I remember walking the site, and there’s camels walking around.”
Lunch is completed, and the press and dignitaries all troop over to the first tee. Some of the imported laborers working on course-side villas put down their tools and line up to watch this little parade, which culminates in the arrival of Els for the ceremonial opening drive. Els is a large man with deliberate movements. Cameras click as he places his ball on a tee and addresses it, calm and steady, like the world-class athlete he is.
Sort of like Sayed Amri.
When I met Amri, a stocky man in a white dishdasha and gutra, he was in his sporting position — the shotgun seat of a white Toyota Land Cruiser on the track at what a sign called New Camel Racing City. There are actually three parallel tracks at New Camel Racing City, a spanking-new facility on the outskirts of town. There’s one for the racing camels and one on each side for the owners’ cars. Amri’s camel was in the race that was about to begin, and Amri was ready to ride it with her.
Camel racing, like falconry, is an actual local sport and one much favored by the Emirati elite. The late Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the former president of the U.A.E. and namesake of Dubai’s skyscraper-laden highway, maintained a large stable of racing camels, and Dubai’s current ruler, Sheik Mohammad, has been reported to own thousands.
Despite this enthusiasm from the top, camel racing seems, at least on the day I visited, to be a sort of anti-spectator sport. As Amri’s race approached, I glanced at the brand-new grandstand. It was empty, and it stayed that way except during the races, when the barefoot workers who led camels to the starting line ran up and took seats to watch the animals’ progress on closed-circuit television. When the camels reached the finish line, the workers rushed from the stands to grab them and lead them away.
This human intervention at start and finish is required by the absence of human jockeys. Strapped to each camel’s back is a radio-controlled gadget with a rotating arm: picture a toaster with a whip. To fool the camels into thinking there’s a person aboard (or just for the fun of it; I never could determine which) the machines are dressed in jockey outfits with jaunty little caps. These robots have the practical benefit of being lightweight. As a bonus, they eliminate the need to use child slaves. (Scandal erupted a few years ago following reports of children purchased in India, Sudan and elsewhere, sometimes from their impoverished parents, for service as camel jockeys. In 2005, the U.A.E. cracked down on the practice and, with Unicef, established a $2.7 million fund to rehabilitate and repatriate the children.)
Amri’s camel is named Mosieh, and her robot jockey was wearing a cheerful yellow jersey. She and 14 other camels were led, in a bit of controlled chaos, to the starting line of the five-mile track. A signal sounded, a mesh gate was lifted and the camels were off.
So were the owners. Fifteen S.U.V.’s started racing down the tracks parallel to the camel run. Amri was chauffeured by his younger brother Mohammed, who wore a black dishdasha and red-checked gutra with a pair of sunglasses tucked rakishly into its folds. As Mosieh ran along the rail, Mohammed kept pace on the opposite side.
In the first half-kilometer, Mosieh broke into the lead. So did Mohammed, even though that required a tricky maneuver to get by a massive GMC. Amri watched his camel calmly, holding the remote control that activated the whip and a walkie-talkie that would broadcast his voice to a speaker on the camel’s back. He used neither, not even when Mosieh began to fall behind: from first to second, to third, to fourth and, finally, to seventh.
Amri still didn’t touch the whip. He just looked back to see what else was coming. It was one more camel; Mosieh was now in eighth place. But Amri cracked only his knuckles, and stroked his face with his left hand, waiting . . . waiting. . . .
Mosieh looked calm as well. The other camels were frothing at the mouth, foam flying as they ran. But Mosieh was foamless, loping steadily onward, her lower lip flapping in the wind.
Then she moved up. From eighth place to seventh. Mosieh was still on the rail, and Mohammed wanted to be next to her, but a Pathfinder had moved in on his left, and a Nissan Patrol, directly in front of him, wouldn’t make room. Mohammed edged over anyway. Inches on the left . . . inches on the front . . . collision seemed imminent.
He made it back to the rail.
In the home stretch now, with perhaps a mile to go, Amri finally stirred. He put the walkie-talkie to his lips and said: “Shhhh!”
Mohammed opened his window, put out his hand and started banging on the car door.
“Hai!” Amri said. “Hai! Hai!” Suddenly he shrieked into the microphone. And shrieked again. And Mosieh moved from seventh place
to sixth.
Only then, with the finish nearly upon them, did Amri activate the whip. He pushed a button on the gizmo in his hand, and the robot whipped the camel. And stopped. Then Amri did it again. The thwacks were audible. Mohammed banged on the car door. Mosieh moved up to fifth, then fourth. She was running at a pace of 20 miles per hour.
“Chuh!” Amri shouted. “Chuh . . . chuh . . . chutch . . . chutch . . . chutch!”
There was the finish, and Mosieh was . . . third. Which was worth 8,000 dirhams ($2,200) and qualified her to move up in class. “It’s good,” Amri said, and he smiled. The Dubai sportsman, modest in victory.
Back on the first tee, Ernie Els doesn’t bother with a practice swing. He puts his head down, takes a final breath, then pivots and lifts his club. The downswing comes swift and strong, and the ball soars, slightly left, heading toward a fairway bunker but stopping short, lined up exactly with the twin Chrysler Buildings in the distance.
Els moves down the fairway, and his gallery moves with him. I find myself walking beside Khalid al-Zarooni, one of the few Emiratis to have followed Els beyond the press conference.
How does he do it, I ask him. How does he get such distinguished athletes to take part in Dubai Sports City?
Al-Zarooni replies in perfect American-accented English, with a pleasant smile: “You put the sugar and the ants will come.”
Ed Zuckerman is an author, journalist and television writer. He reported on the long-distance swimmer Martin Strel in Play’s June 2007 issue.
www.nytimes.com/
Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The help: Imported workers at Dubailand.
By ED ZUCKERMAN
Published: March 2, 2008
Race-camel handlers run for their lives.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The English cricket star Andrew Flintoff inaugurates the Ernie Els course.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
A falcon-athlete is chauffered to its event.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
Fresh powder and a T.G.I. Friday's: Alpine charm at Ski Dubai, mere steps away from the food court.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
The hype: Ernie Els (in apron) tends to Martina Navratilova and guests at a publicity event for his new course.
Photo: Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times
An oasis of delight: The Dubai Motor City fleshpots.
Never mind that they were in the middle of a desert. The grains of sand all around them, microscopically speaking, were too round. Perfect sand traps require angular sand (so that golf balls don’t stick in trap walls but roll to the bottom); angular sand was located and ordered from Saudi Arabia, next door. Trucks were loaded, but they were turned back at the border. For reasons unclear, Saudi Arabia wanted to hold on to that sand. So the builders of the Els Club golf course at Dubai Sports City, a vast sports complex now rising in the round-sand desert, had to settle for their second-choice sand — also from Saudi Arabia, but of a type the Saudis were willing to export.
It was the only time they settled for second choice in anything.
“Our dedication to providing the best that is available and partnering with excellence is borne out in everything we do,” declares Khalid Abdulrahim Mohammed al-Zarooni, a prominent Dubai businessman and graduate of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who is the president of Dubai Sports City. Nearing completion on the 50-million-square-foot grounds are a 25,000-seat, state-of-the-art cricket stadium; a 60,000-seat stadium for soccer and rugby; an indoor arena for ice hockey and concerts; a field-hockey venue; a tennis academy; and a Manchester United soccer school. More than 900 villas and town houses — “one of the most luxurious and advanced communities in the world” — are under construction on the fringes of the golf course, to be marketed to Western expats and as vacation homes for rich Middle Easterners (Iran is just 100 miles away). Planned are additional homes and apartments to house 65,000 people, a hospital specializing in sports medicine, a kilometer-long canal and a 230-store shopping mall with “one of the most sensational food courts ever built.”
All of which makes Dubai Sports City, in Dubai terms, a fairly modest endeavor. It’s part of a larger building project called Dubailand that will feature Motor City; Dubai Lifestyle City; Islamic Culture and Science World; and a residential development anchored by replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Most of that is still on the drawing board, eventually to join the dozens of brand-new skyscrapers along Sheik Zayed Road, a 12-lane highway perpetually congested with Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers. Towering above them all is the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building (currently at 159 stories — 1,985 feet — and rising higher, headed toward a final height that remains a secret). From the window of my hotel room in Dubai Media City, I could see 14 new high-rise towers and 24 others under construction. One of those recently completed was a 53-story copy of the Chrysler Building. Next to it was another 53-story copy of the Chrysler Building.
What Dubai once was is still visible in a downtown commercial district filled with low-rise shops and crowds of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and native Emiratis mingling in every conceivable variety of robe and headdress, where amplified calls to prayer send men running past the Hip Hop clothing emporium and a block of auto-parts stores to shuck their shoes and dash into a washroom marked “The Toilet Only for Muslims” before heading into a mosque to pray. New Dubai has been constructed in what used to be empty desert outside town, in accordance with the frequently cited vision of His Highness Sheik Mohammad Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai. (That is “ruler” in the sense of no political parties and no real elections, so much nicer than being a mere “decider.”) Sheik Mohammad dreams of using his little country’s billions of oil dollars to turn it into a cross between Singapore, Miami Beach and Las Vegas before the oil runs out. Building the biggest and best of everything has included making the place a world sports Mecca. You should pardon the expression.
A few days before I arrived in late January, the world’s richest marathon was run along Dubai’s Persian Gulf shore. Coming this month is the world’s richest horse race. Next year, the world’s richest golf tournament will debut, a bookend to the annual Dubai Desert Classic that Tiger Woods won (for the second time) a few days after I left. Woods has been a regular in Dubai, possibly tempted by the $3 million he reportedly gets from the Desert Classic just for showing up. He is currently building the world’s first Tiger Woods golf course, in Dubailand.
“With a potential reach of two billion spectators within a four-hour flight zone . . . the U.A.E. is geographically positioned to be a major hub for sporting events,” explains the literature for Dubai Sports City. Plans are to host an annual “flagship” event in each of six sports: soccer, rugby, tennis, golf, field hockey and cricket. Dubai Sports City is spending a million dirhams ($270,000) to import 940 tons of soil from England, Pakistan and Australia for its practice cricket pitches, so teams heading to international matches can rehearse on the surfaces they will be playing on. Dubai has already made a major cricket score, persuading the International Cricket Council to abandon its headquarters at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London after nearly a century and move to Dubai Sports City. The inducements were proximity to the cricket-playing countries of Asia and substantial tax breaks. There are no taxes in Dubai.
For those not seduced by an imitation-Australian cricket pitch, Dubai offers other lures — white-sand beaches, a half-dozen new golf courses, an Autodrome for Grand Prix races, name-chef restaurants, absurdly luxurious hotels and spas and an active disco and bar scene in those hotels (which are exempt from the Islamic ban on alcoholic beverages). Roger Federer has a home in Dubai, and other Western tourists and celebrities are turning up. In January alone, Elton John gave a concert in Abu Dhabi, just down the road; Bill Gates flew in to announce a partnership with the Dubai School of Government; and George W. Bush stopped by for lunch and a tour. George Clooney and Sharon Stone made appearances during the Dubai International Film Festival in December, and Shrek is on his way — a Dreamworks Animation theme park has just been announced for Dubailand.
If all that sounds slightly manufactured, it is. Witness Ski Dubai, an indoor ski mountain attached to one of the city’s mammoth shopping malls. You walk by a food court and turn right to reach the ticket area, where you pay 150 dirhams ($40) for two hours. The price includes equipment rental (skis, boots, parka and snow pants), disposable socks and accident insurance. Then you take an escalator up to a revolving door that leads to . . . a ski village. There’s a bunny slope, a snow park with tubes, a miniluge for the kids and a chairlift to the top of a 1,300-foot run with a 200-foot drop. There’s also the overcautious attitude of people who aren’t used to skiing. An attendant at the chair’s midstation chided me for not having my safety bar down; moments later an attendant at the top chided me for lifting it five feet too soon.
But it’s not a bad little hill: packed powder, no wind. If anything could be improved, it’s the quality of the light, which is flat and blue, reflected off blue walls and ceiling. One run, with a sharp dip at midpoint, is promoted as the world’s first indoor black-diamond run. It’s an easy black run, though — which, of course, is not good enough for Dubai. Dubailand has plans for an indoor ski dome with a revolving slope and artificial mountain range. And penguins. Still, I found penguinless Ski Dubai a pleasant enough respite from the other incongruities of this place. I got on the lift next to a 12-year-old boy with a snowboard and asked him where he was from.
“Palestine,” he said.
He took my surprise as confusion.
“Did you hear of it?” he asked.
Yeah, I said, I’d heard of it. This was the same week half the population of Gaza had broken down a wall into Egypt so they could buy gasoline and soap.
“We are living in Dubai,” the boy said, “but we are moving to Canada soon.”
Better snowboarding there, I said.
He nodded and pointed to a jump on the slope beneath us that was closed, to his disappointment. “It is only open sometimes,” he said. “In Canada, it will always be open.” Then our chair reached the top, and he jumped on his board and took off like a shot, straight down.
The man with the falcon didn’t ski. Or golf. Or play tennis. He was an Emirati engaged in an Emirati sport. Who cared about the two billion spectators? He had his bird.
I had driven out from the city, beyond the endless construction, past signs promising future construction (“Your Spanish Lifestyle Villas!”) and into the desert, where 50 or so four-wheel-drive S.U.V.’s were parked for the al-Fazza Falcon Hunting Championship and 50 or so men were waiting for their falcons’ turn to fly.
The men (with a few boys, no women) were all Emiratis. This was, in fact, the first time since arriving in Dubai that I’d been in a group where local citizens were a majority. Emiratis comprise less than 20 percent of Dubai’s 1.4 million residents. The rest are foreign workers, ranging from the middle-management Brits and Americans and Australians who run Dubai Sports City to hundreds of thousands of Indians and Pakistanis who labor on construction sites and at the ends of their long workdays are bused directly to compounds in the desert. The outnumbered Emiratis have one solace — they own the place.
This particular group of Emiratis, however, did not own all the falcons on their arms. Many were falcon tenders in the service of the ruling family, whose members take falconry extremely seriously (when President George W. Bush visited, he was photographed holding a royal falcon) and who owned a substantial percentage of the birds in the competition. One of those was Barraqy, a brown and white gyr-peregrine hybrid with an evil glare that perched on the wrist of the man sitting on the sand beside a Land Rover. He offered me a snack of sweet dates and watery Arabic coffee and showed me Barraqy’s passport (yes, passport; did I mention that falconry is taken seriously here?). The document identified the bird’s owner as “H. H. Shk. Mohammad R. al-Maktoum.” Barraqy is worth 150,000 dirhams ($40,000), the man said, but he discreetly avoided answering when I asked how many falcons the ruler owns. So did Dr. Mariam Hampel, a German veterinarian at the competition, who told me she works at Sheik Mohammad’s private falcon hospital, where she sees 30 to 40 birds a day. “They are very sensitive to fungal diseases,” she said, “and parasitic diseases. And they get bone fractures. I have to pin —”
“Dottora!”
Dr. Hampel was interrupted by a man in a white dishdasha standing by a temporary fabric fence. A falcon had just been taken behind the fence to begin its flight (the fence serving to shield it from visual distractions), and it was Dr. Hampel’s job to scan the bird with a hand-held device that would read a microchip implanted in its chest and confirm its identity. She did so, and the falcon was released. Some 400 yards away, a trainer was swinging a feathered lure, a crude imitation of the flight of a bird that a falcon would ordinarily hunt and kill. The falcon spotted it and flew off, straight and low, to strike the lure and be rewarded with a hunk of raw meat. The bird’s time was captured by a laser meter and the results posted on a computer monitor near the starting line, where the men gathered to watch. They chewed dates and talked on cell phones. As newcomers arrived, friends greeted friends in traditional Emirati fashion by leaning toward each other and bumping noses.
Is that Martina? I look again and yes, it is. Martina Navratilova is sitting in the front row of the press conference at Dubai Sports City next to a soccer player, a rugby player and a cricketer, all of whom I, being American, have never heard of but who are apparently world-famous. They have all turned up to support their good friend Ernie Els (currently ranked the fourth-best golfer on Earth and someone I have heard of) as he presides over the grand opening of the Els Club golf course, which he designed and which is the first athletic facility to be completed at Dubai Sports City. Els, in navy slacks and powder blue golf shirt, is seated on the dais between two Emiratis in dishdashas. He says he is thrilled to be here. “I’ve been coming to Dubai since 1993, and I’ve always wanted to build something in Dubai, and, luckily enough for our company, with Khalid we struck up a relationship” — he nods toward al-Zarooni, the president of Dubai Sports City — “and here we are.”
Building this course, he acknowledges, was not without challenges. “The sand would keep moving. I mean . . . you try to put a bunker in place, and overnight there’s a bit of a breeze, and the bunker has moved. So we had to really work quickly. If we worked on a particular hole we had to try to finish what we started.”
Plus there was the time he came for a visit in the summer and it was 117 degrees. He lasted half an hour outside.
It is pleasantly cool on the terrace of the temporary clubhouse where the international golf press devours a buffet lunch. This is the desert winter, with temperatures around 70 and occasional rain. The course looks stunning — intense green against the brown sand. To keep it green, the course is pock-marked with 2,256 sprinkler heads capable of delivering two million gallons of water every 12 hours.
Martina Navratilova — who, I’m told by an official of Dubai Sports City, might get involved with a new tennis academy here — is taking a few swings on the practice range. She’s soon joined by the other athletic guests of honor (for the record: the soccer goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, the cricketer Andrew Flintoff and the South African rugby star John Smit). Greg Letsche, one of Els’s designers, is standing nearby, looking with quiet satisfaction at the contours of the course. “Basically, you’re creating 18 holes out of a virtually flat surface,” he says. “Sometimes you like a lonely oak tree or a stream to give you some inspiration to begin with.” At Dubai Sports City, he had none of that. “It was a blank palette. I remember walking the site, and there’s camels walking around.”
Lunch is completed, and the press and dignitaries all troop over to the first tee. Some of the imported laborers working on course-side villas put down their tools and line up to watch this little parade, which culminates in the arrival of Els for the ceremonial opening drive. Els is a large man with deliberate movements. Cameras click as he places his ball on a tee and addresses it, calm and steady, like the world-class athlete he is.
Sort of like Sayed Amri.
When I met Amri, a stocky man in a white dishdasha and gutra, he was in his sporting position — the shotgun seat of a white Toyota Land Cruiser on the track at what a sign called New Camel Racing City. There are actually three parallel tracks at New Camel Racing City, a spanking-new facility on the outskirts of town. There’s one for the racing camels and one on each side for the owners’ cars. Amri’s camel was in the race that was about to begin, and Amri was ready to ride it with her.
Camel racing, like falconry, is an actual local sport and one much favored by the Emirati elite. The late Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the former president of the U.A.E. and namesake of Dubai’s skyscraper-laden highway, maintained a large stable of racing camels, and Dubai’s current ruler, Sheik Mohammad, has been reported to own thousands.
Despite this enthusiasm from the top, camel racing seems, at least on the day I visited, to be a sort of anti-spectator sport. As Amri’s race approached, I glanced at the brand-new grandstand. It was empty, and it stayed that way except during the races, when the barefoot workers who led camels to the starting line ran up and took seats to watch the animals’ progress on closed-circuit television. When the camels reached the finish line, the workers rushed from the stands to grab them and lead them away.
This human intervention at start and finish is required by the absence of human jockeys. Strapped to each camel’s back is a radio-controlled gadget with a rotating arm: picture a toaster with a whip. To fool the camels into thinking there’s a person aboard (or just for the fun of it; I never could determine which) the machines are dressed in jockey outfits with jaunty little caps. These robots have the practical benefit of being lightweight. As a bonus, they eliminate the need to use child slaves. (Scandal erupted a few years ago following reports of children purchased in India, Sudan and elsewhere, sometimes from their impoverished parents, for service as camel jockeys. In 2005, the U.A.E. cracked down on the practice and, with Unicef, established a $2.7 million fund to rehabilitate and repatriate the children.)
Amri’s camel is named Mosieh, and her robot jockey was wearing a cheerful yellow jersey. She and 14 other camels were led, in a bit of controlled chaos, to the starting line of the five-mile track. A signal sounded, a mesh gate was lifted and the camels were off.
So were the owners. Fifteen S.U.V.’s started racing down the tracks parallel to the camel run. Amri was chauffeured by his younger brother Mohammed, who wore a black dishdasha and red-checked gutra with a pair of sunglasses tucked rakishly into its folds. As Mosieh ran along the rail, Mohammed kept pace on the opposite side.
In the first half-kilometer, Mosieh broke into the lead. So did Mohammed, even though that required a tricky maneuver to get by a massive GMC. Amri watched his camel calmly, holding the remote control that activated the whip and a walkie-talkie that would broadcast his voice to a speaker on the camel’s back. He used neither, not even when Mosieh began to fall behind: from first to second, to third, to fourth and, finally, to seventh.
Amri still didn’t touch the whip. He just looked back to see what else was coming. It was one more camel; Mosieh was now in eighth place. But Amri cracked only his knuckles, and stroked his face with his left hand, waiting . . . waiting. . . .
Mosieh looked calm as well. The other camels were frothing at the mouth, foam flying as they ran. But Mosieh was foamless, loping steadily onward, her lower lip flapping in the wind.
Then she moved up. From eighth place to seventh. Mosieh was still on the rail, and Mohammed wanted to be next to her, but a Pathfinder had moved in on his left, and a Nissan Patrol, directly in front of him, wouldn’t make room. Mohammed edged over anyway. Inches on the left . . . inches on the front . . . collision seemed imminent.
He made it back to the rail.
In the home stretch now, with perhaps a mile to go, Amri finally stirred. He put the walkie-talkie to his lips and said: “Shhhh!”
Mohammed opened his window, put out his hand and started banging on the car door.
“Hai!” Amri said. “Hai! Hai!” Suddenly he shrieked into the microphone. And shrieked again. And Mosieh moved from seventh place
to sixth.
Only then, with the finish nearly upon them, did Amri activate the whip. He pushed a button on the gizmo in his hand, and the robot whipped the camel. And stopped. Then Amri did it again. The thwacks were audible. Mohammed banged on the car door. Mosieh moved up to fifth, then fourth. She was running at a pace of 20 miles per hour.
“Chuh!” Amri shouted. “Chuh . . . chuh . . . chutch . . . chutch . . . chutch!”
There was the finish, and Mosieh was . . . third. Which was worth 8,000 dirhams ($2,200) and qualified her to move up in class. “It’s good,” Amri said, and he smiled. The Dubai sportsman, modest in victory.
Back on the first tee, Ernie Els doesn’t bother with a practice swing. He puts his head down, takes a final breath, then pivots and lifts his club. The downswing comes swift and strong, and the ball soars, slightly left, heading toward a fairway bunker but stopping short, lined up exactly with the twin Chrysler Buildings in the distance.
Els moves down the fairway, and his gallery moves with him. I find myself walking beside Khalid al-Zarooni, one of the few Emiratis to have followed Els beyond the press conference.
How does he do it, I ask him. How does he get such distinguished athletes to take part in Dubai Sports City?
Al-Zarooni replies in perfect American-accented English, with a pleasant smile: “You put the sugar and the ants will come.”
Ed Zuckerman is an author, journalist and television writer. He reported on the long-distance swimmer Martin Strel in Play’s June 2007 issue.
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