Dubai: Sporting Paradise — With a Price

It’s not every day that I get to link to ESPN.com on this blog, but the website is currently featuring a fascinating article on Dubai’s efforts to turn the country into a sporting paradise.

Dubai is the second richest — behind Abu Dhabi — of the seven emirates comprising the United Arab Emirates that stretch along a narrow crescent between Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. It has surprisingly little oil, though. So little, in fact, that production made up only 6 percent of Dubai’s gross national product last year, a figure that will continue to decline until the oil wells run dry within a decade. Dubai relies instead on free trade, heavy corporate investment — it has no taxes (a prime draw for Halliburton’s move here) — and tourism.

This is where sports fit into the overall vision for Dubai as seen by Sheikh Mohammed.

According to Rashid Al Kamali of the Dubai Sports Council, “the goal is to use sport as a platform to attract global exposure for Dubai.” It already has. Television cameras bring Dubai into living rooms around the world via the annual Desert Classic golf tournament (you probably saw Tiger Woods teeing off against the city skyline in February), the Dubai Duty Free tennis tournament (maybe you saw Andre Agassi and Roger Federer playing on the helipad atop the 1,000-foot high Burj Al Arab hotel) and, of course, the World Cup horse race.

And that’s just the beginning.

Construction of the first Tiger Woods golf course — Al Ruwaya — is under way here, with plans including 300 luxury villas, 20 mansions, an 80-room boutique hotel and a shopping area. Cricket is moving its ICC world headquarters here. Manchester United will open a soccer academy here. Sheikh Mohammed and the royal family just announced plans for Meydan, a 67-million-square-foot horse track and development with the hope of one day landing the Breeder’s Cup. Rising from the sands southwest of Dubai already is Dubai Sports City, a $3.5 billion, 50-million-square-foot housing, recreation and entertainment development that will one day be home to 65,000 sports fans. “This will give you a chance to live sports,” says Dubai Sports City chief executive U. Balasubramaniam.

Live it? The only thing missing from the Dubai Sports City blueprint is a “SportsCenter” studio. The Ernie Els golf course that winds among the luxury villas, townhomes, hotels and a shopping mall will open in the fall. ManU’s soccer academy will compete for students with a Butch Harmon golf school and a David Lloyd Tennis Academy. There will be a cricket stadium, a 10,000-seat tennis and ice hockey arena (yes, ice hockey) and a 60,000-seat main stadium. Naturally, you’ll have to pay to use or attend those facilities, but you will avoid the bane of all fans — postgame traffic.

The idea of a sports paradise in the desert is both jarring and seductive. Here is Dubai’s best “driving range”:

And here is Dubai’s surreal indoor ski area:

All of this opulence, not surprisingly, comes with a price. As the article points out, the workers who keep Dubai running don’t share in its wealth:

These are largely the foreign workers who come from all over south Asia and north Africa, the ones who work the low-pay service and construction jobs that keep Dubai growing. They are here for the horse races, a cheap night out and the slim hope of winning the Pick Seven. Betting on the horses is illegal, but the free Pick Seven is not. Pick all seven winners on the card correctly and you take home $14,000. The odds, of course, are astronomical, but $14,000 can represent four hard years of wages for some of these workers, who live in overcrowded work compounds outside Dubai. They bus in early each morning, six days a week, some riding two hours each way in the heavy traffic.

“They live eight to a room,” my taxi driver said when we passed a work compound one day. “They make maybe $250 a month. I hear that some of them come here just so they can eat.”

When he says this, I think of Peter Vittuli’s description of the horse barns. Trust me when I tell you, I’ve stayed in places that aren’t as nice as the stalls.

It has been alleged that some of these workers cannot leave because their work sponsors “misplace” their passports. They cannot earn citizenship no matter how many years they work in Dubai, nor can their children. The suicides of depressed workers have received international media attention. The Gulf News just reported that meningitis cases are rising among laborers and the government is considering mandatory vaccinations. Still, the wages are far better than they can earn in their homelands, and even if the conditions are poor, thousands more stream in each year to join them.

As always, unfettered capitalism works for some much better than others. Even in paradise.