Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Dubai

  There are many places in the world where I still yearn to race, many where I would like to be a regular for the big occasions. Nowhere does that apply more than Dubai, where I went for the Financial Times one year to discover how Sheikh Mohammed has used horseracing to brand and publicise his country as the ultimate sportsman’s destination:

  It is three hours before the start of the 2009 Dubai World Cup, the richest race meeting in the world (total prize money $21.5m [£14.2m]) and the climax of the Arab emirate’s annual two-month racing carnival. At the Nad Al Sheba racetrack thousands of people are already installed and in the free public enclosures people are shedding their shoes and spreading small carpets on any spare patch of concrete terrace or grass.

  Women in black abayas, some wearing veils which cover all but their eyes, dish out family picnics of curry and flatbread. Groups of men in white dishdashas squat down to pore over newspaper form sheets. Others, in rope-circled kefiyehs, stride up and down the concourse discussing the prospects of local trainers and riders against the invaders from the US and Britain, from Hong Kong and South Africa, from Australia and Japan.

  Along the track at the 300-metre mark, the atmosphere among paying customers at what is regarded as Dubai’s social event of the year is a cross between Royal Ascot and Cheltenham. In the ‘Irish Village’ young male expats enjoy a Guinness or three while in the ‘Bubble Lounge’ girls in floaty mini-dresses and high heels drink champagne before teetering off for a photoshoot with Ahlan!, a Hello-style magazine.

  If, as economic commentators have suggested, Dubai’s bubble has burst then there is little sign of it here – not unless you feel restricted by a choice between Bollinger, Taittinger and five other types of champagne.

  In the coveted reserved seats of the main stand, a fluttering of white robes in mini-Mexican waves reflects the movements of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, clad in the blue that is the livery of his worldwide racing operation Godolphin. When he stands, everyone stands. When he sits, everyone sits. When he moves down to the parade ring to inspect the horses, to brief a jockey or congratulate a winner, a gently rustling phalanx of 20 or 30 accompanies him.

  Racing folk around the world refer to the meet, with its lavish laser-light shows, horse acrobatics and fireworks, as ‘Sheikh Mo’s desert party’. And this time there is plenty for him to celebrate. Godolphin enjoys a one-two in a couple of early races. But the best is saved for last and the final three races on the card.

  The successful rider in the first two is the apprentice Ahmad Ajtebi, a former camel rider and protégé of Sheikh Mohammed. Leading from the front on Gladiatorus and swooping in the last stride on Eastern Anthem, he becomes the first Emirati jockey in the event’s 14-year history to win a race on World Cup night. Both horses are locally trained by first-season handler Mubarak bin Shafya and each runs in the colours of one of Sheikh Mohammed’s sons.

  In Europe I had been counselled that the Arab racing scene, with alcohol restricted and on-track betting banned, lacked atmosphere. Not at Nad Al Sheba. The triumphant apprentice milks the crowd, rising in his stirrups, pointing to his chest, waving his whip and raising both hands aloft. Frankie Dettori, the top jockey in Sheikh Mohammed’s worldwide operation, couldn’t have done it better and the whistling, cheering response is delirious, louder even than when the American horse Well Armed streaks home to win the final $6m World Cup race.

  British-based jockey John Egan, who rides in Dubai for prominent owner Dr James Hay, has also experienced the Dubai race fans’ passion: ‘They’ll be going ‘E-gan, E-gan, E-gan’, whether you are riding a 50-1 shot or a 6-4 favourite,’ he tells me. ‘Perhaps they’ve backed you before on one that’s won. I often see the same people cheering me.’ Hay, whose wife Fitri has three runners in her pink and green colours on World Cup night, adds, ‘They kind of adopt horses. It’s almost like a football team.’

  Despite the lack of on-course betting, financial allegiances are not entirely absent from the proceedings. Although I was barred access to a betting website from my hotel room computer, there was no such problem phoning a UK bookmaker and, somehow, I don’t think all the racegoers I saw with mobile phones to their ears five minutes before the off were calling their wives to inquire if they should drop in for a takeaway on the way home.

  For locals without recourse to out-of-country betting, there are free-to-enter competitions – no money hazarded – requiring them to select the first three horses home in each of two races or the ‘Pick Seven’, in which they must find the winner of every race. The odds against doing so are forbidding but the rewards if they succeed are life-transforming. To a low-wage construction worker on a Dubai skyscraper, £20,000 is a fortune beyond belief.

  On World Cup night there was a surprising amount of intermittent rain, but nothing could spoil the party. Ajtebi’s victories and the fact that this was the last Dubai World Cup to be held at Nad Al Sheba – next year it will move to a venue currently under construction at nearby Meydan – gave the occasion a landmark feel. It also marked a new stage in Dubai’s strategy of using a horse race to market a country, a concept which has, in the past decade and a half, rewritten the international racing calendar and boosted the fortunes of previously overlooked racing countries.

  Why horses? Partly, it’s because the ‘boss’, as those who work for Sheikh Mohammed refer to him, has a passion for them and for racing. Last week, amid the serenity of the Godolphin yard, I spoke to Simon Crisford, the former journalist who has been Godolphin’s racing manager since the early 1990s. The boss, now the wrong side of 60, was elsewhere – out riding in a 120km endurance race.

  Crisford says of a man said to be able to distinguish his own camel’s tracks from those of a hundred others in the desert sands, ‘Sheikh Mohammed is as close to nature as anyone you could ever meet. That’s what fascinates him about this sport. He wouldn’t get the same attraction from looking at cars or football players.’ The Sheikh’s favourite horse, Dubai Millennium, could be a brute with some people. But his owner would spend hours in Dubai Millenium’s box. He would fondle the horse’s tongue, and the horse would rest his head under the Sheikh’s arm.

  Passion is matched by pragmatism. Sheikh Mohammed, who shuttles a hundred horses to Newmarket around this time of year for the British season, based Godolphin in Dubai because he wanted his horses near him and because the climate aided their preparation. He founded the World Cup both to foster true international competition and because he planned a future for Dubai as a sporting and tourist destination when the oil runs out. The first chairman of the Dubai World Cup committee, back in 1996, was instructed, ‘You are here to market Dubai as a tourist destination. We’ve got to fill all these five-star hotels.’

  Dubai has few historic panoramas to attract the tourist so the Maktoums chose another way to make its mark. They determined that it would epitomise the culture of being biggest, best and first. This is why the tiny emirate now boasts the tallest building in the world, the still-growing Burj Dubai; the biggest man-made island in the world, Palm Jumeirah; and a 400-metre ski run in a shopping mall. The fact that the thoroughbred originated in his part of the world also convinced Sheikh Mohammed to put horses at the centre of Dubai’s appeal.

  First there were international jockey competitions. Then, 14 years ago, came the first World Cup. Logistically there were hurdles. For the inaugural event Dubai wanted to entice Allan Paulson, the boss of Gulfstream and owner of Cigar, then the best horse in the world. Paulson wouldn’t come without his dogs accompanying him, so quarantine rules were waived for him to bring them on his executive jet. There are advantages sometimes in being a principality.

  The presence of a champion like Cigar was seen as crucial. Sheikh Mohammed wanted his horses to be the best. But that involved racing them against the best and, as Crisford explains, ‘Americans then had a fear of coming to Dubai. “Why travel so far to run in the desert?” Bu
t Paulson did.’ Having arrived, he marvelled that Sheikh Mohammed, as Paulson enviously put it, had been able to sell a race, a city and a country to the world for the cost of one night’s prize money.

  Others quickly followed Paulson’s example and so a meeting which started as a curiosity, a one-off desert party before the real racing season began, became a key fixture in the international racing calendar. Then, five years ago, the first Dubai Carnival of Racing was held. Running from January to mid-March it subsidises international owners to encourage them to bring their best horses. Why run for £3,000 on the all-weather track at Lingfield in February when you can be competing for £100,000 at normally sunny Nad Al Sheba?

  A decade ago, the world knew little of racehorses from South Africa or South America. But Invasor, who won the 2007 World Cup for Sheikh Mohammed’s brother Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum, was bred in Argentina and originally trained in Uruguay. Of the World Cup field on Saturday night, four horses had begun their careers in Argentina and two more in Brazil. Herman Brown, a South African trainer, says, ‘Dubai has given us a venue and become a showcase for our horses. You cannot believe what has been done for our breeding industry.’

  Until this year, 659 horses from 25 countries had run in the Dubai carnivals. Visitors had won more than half the races contested and taken home more than $103m in prize money. Construction magnate Jim Hay, whose racing career began amid warm beer and soggy pies backing handicappers on Scottish tracks, says that the carnival is like Royal Ascot, only longer: ‘You get the opportunity to compete with the absolute crème de la crème. What drives owners is partly the prize money but also the sheer colour.’ This is a common view and generally the only grumble you hear from the owners is that the Maktoums’ bottomless purses, perhaps being drawn a little tighter now, have inflated bloodstock prices to levels few can afford.

  On the back of its international racing and other sporting showcases Dubai has built up its tourism from 50,000 a year in 1996 to more than 5m currently. It has hosted golf’s Desert Classic since 1989, and has redrawn the game’s map to the extent that what used to be the European Tour of Merit is being replaced by the ‘Race to Dubai’. It also stages world-class tennis tournaments, and the Sports City project, due to be finished in 2010, includes a 25,000-capacity cricket stadium which might offer an alternative venue for international teams driven out of the Indian subcontinent by terrorism.

  Dubai authorities have made some adjustments to the world scene: they realised they had to swallow hard and accept betting-related television deals in other countries to get the Carnival fixtures shown across the world. But others have had to change their calendars. Clive Brittain, a British trainer who has been coming to Dubai since the racing started, says, ‘We are having to adjust our season to cope with an early spring.’

  Crisford argues that Godolphin, which has become a kind of Dubai national team around the world’s racetracks, has with the World Cup helped make Dubai the sporting capital of the Middle East. ‘In any one week during the winter you might have Frankie Dettori, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods and Michael Schumacher all here at the same time,’ he says. ‘Sport out here is massive and the people love it.’

  In 2000, before Dubai Millennium won the World Cup (the horse was boldly named with that target in mind), Sheikh Mohammed said, ‘You can’t just do your job and sit at home. We must strive together, we must go forward, we must invent something – even from nothing. That’s what Godolphin is about, that’s what Dubai is about, that’s what me and my brothers are about.’

  But can the development continue at the rate it has? A year ago Dubai was keeping busy a third of the cranes in the world. The pace of new building was such that taxi drivers needed monthly refresher courses in finding their way round. But, like anywhere else that has expanded fast on borrowed money, Dubai is hurting. Local employers are shedding labour and projects have been mothballed.

  Some in the racing community have fretted that the new course at Meydan, where Sheikh Mohammed has promised to increase the purse for the World Cup race alone from $6m to $10m, could find itself among them. But Simon Crisford insists there is no need to worry: ‘I don’t know where that fear is coming from. It’s absolute nonsense. Things may be slowing down a bit but Meydan’s not slowing down.’ Nad Al Sheba regulars such as Clive Brittain are also optimistic. ‘If Sheikh Mohammed says it will happen, it will,’ he says.

  Sure enough, when last weekend’s racing was finished, the next morning bulldozers moved into Nad Al Sheba to pull down its Maktoum and Millennium grandstands, facilities which many British tracks would be proud to offer. At nearby Meydan, meanwhile, the shell of a one-kilometre long ‘landscraper’ grandstand has started to take shape. It has, of course, become the biggest in the world.

  Mauritius

  Wherever I have been in the world, following prime ministers and presidents in the day job or simply on holiday, the first thing to go into my hand baggage has always been my binoculars. One of the most pleasurable holiday surprises was going racing in Mauritus back in 1998.

  Before last Saturday’s Colonel Baker Cup, runners from the ‘Epsom’ and ‘Ascot’ stables paraded along with those from Ecurie Fok and Ecurie Gujadhur. But this was Port Louis, Mauritius, not Newbury or Goodwood. Overshadowing the parade ring was a majestic banyan tree. In corrugated iron and canvas shacks in the centre of the course the cheap enclosure crowd parked their crash helmets with an enterprising stallholder, ate fish and rice from steaming vats and gambled incessantly between races at pique, throwing darts onto chequered number boards. Crowds thronged around (win only) bookies with takeaway curry names like Yeung Kim Fat, Foo Kune and Herve Wong Leung Ki. The ‘Epsom’ and ‘Ascot’ stables clustered among monkey puzzle trees on a hillside of elegant villas behind the Champ de Mars racecourse: on the other side were mountain crests known as the Lion, the Thumb and the Frog. The beach that day could offer little competition.

  Mauritius is an island where Hindu, Tamil, Muslim, Franco-Mauritians, Chinese and Creoles seem to co-exist happily in a tension-free jumble of inter-married races, languages and religions, and appropriately racing began there as a means of creating unity. Shortly after the British ousted the French colonial power, the good Colonel Draper decided that Franco-British relations could best be improved by turning the old army manoeuvres ground into the second-oldest racecourse in the southern hemisphere. And if the English won the original power struggle, the French seem to have had the best of it in recent years on the racecourse. Serge Henry was that year heading for his third successive trainers’ championship.

  Racing and betting have thrived in Mauritius since that 1812 inception and the Mauritius Turf Club conducts weekly meetings from May through to November. Eight recognised stables provide the bulk of the handicappers in six divisions who contest events from 1,365 metres to 2,400, with seven freelance trainers responsible for the rest of the 350 horses trained on the island.

  Punters certainly get some assistance. As many as 300 people turn up to watch morning work on the track from 5.30am. Each horse has to exercise bearing its name and every walk, canter and ‘spurt’ is meticulously recorded and made available when Saturday declarations are announced. Security is tight. Horses due to run the next Saturday have to be produced the Sunday before, They are then secured in stables which can only be opened by double lock, with one key held by stable staff and the other by the security team. Officials follow each horse to and from its morning exercise.

  Copious racecard information (British racetracks please copy) enabled even this ignorant visitor to find three winners on the eight-race card and contests were conducted with military precision. Saddling up and ‘Horses away’ commands are swiftly obeyed. No sooner are the contestants on their way to the start than red-shirted attendants are hand-whisking loose straw back into the saddling boxes.

  I watched a couple of races with Khalid Rawat, the generously welcoming and needle-sharp clerk of the course.
Before each race he checked every jockey’s colours, sending back Australian Gavin Howes to change. In the parade ring he was noting that not only blinkers, visors and bandages were as declared but even which kind of bit each horse had fitted. We watched from the judges’ box with its distinctive odour of film developer. Then it was swiftly down to the weighing room to tape-record the comments of the jockeys as they came in. Not only would the stewards hear them, they would be published for all to see.

  In Mauritius jockeys, not trainers, saddle up the horses. A wise precaution, said Khalid, with such intense betting interest. No jockey will willingly risk a slipping saddle. Should such an accident occur, no one can point a finger of suspicion at the yard.

  Sadly for Mauritians, most winners are ridden not by locals who lack apprentice schools or even an electric horse but by imports from South Africa or Australia who have not quite made the top grade at home, grizzled veterans on the downward slope or youngsters seeking to broaden their experience. One in the latter category, the film-star blond Piet Botha, argued that if you can ride winners in Mauritius you can ride them anywhere: ‘It’s a tight track with a lot of tactical riding. You need a lot in your favour to win, a decent draw, a reasonable weight and plenty of luck.’ You could say he has had that. Botha had only ridden two winners this year to add to his 120 in South Africa but they included two of the four Mauritian Classics.

  It really is a tough school. Five jockeys have already been sacked by their trainers this season: ‘There’s too much money involved for people to be patient. One moment you are a hero to the crowd, the next they are calling you names.’