Dubai builds a Sports Oasis

[RAPTOR]

It's Not a Mirage: Dubai Is Building a Sports Oasis

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By LORNE MANLY




Published: May 9, 2006
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — In the middle of a stretch of desert, with little more than a few spindly trees for company, David Krekoski stepped out of his Caterpillar bulldozer to smoke a cigarette.

Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press
Dubai, with 1.4 million residents, will have to attract 800,000 more by 2008 to fill the planned buildings.

Enlarge This Image
Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press
A computer rendering of Dubai Sports City, which will feature four stadiums, a championship-caliber golf course and an indoor ski resort.



Krekoski is a shaper, a groomer of golf courses, and the latest example of his well-compensated handiwork is beginning to bloom here in this Persian Gulf desert kingdom. Though perhaps difficult to imagine, two lakes will soon nestle among 18 landscaped holes on a championship-caliber golf course designed by Ernie Els. Sand trucked in from elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates will replace the too-fine sand of Dubai under the groomed grass of the fairways and in the bunkers. And to underlie the greens, Krekoski and his bosses at Troon Golf will turn to the red sand of Saudi Arabia.
The care and cost being shoveled into what will be known as the Dunes at Victory Heights are emblematic of not just the golf course and the villas and townhouses woven through the golf community, but of the entire complex being built here. Dubai Sports City — costing $2.5 billion and sprawling over 50 million square feet — aspires to be a bustling minimetropolis devoted to sports, a Xanadu for spectators and participants when it partly opens next year.
Four stadiums, ranging in size from a 10,000-seat multipurpose indoor arena to an outdoor stadium with room for more than 60,000, will play host to basketball, cricket, rugby, soccer and even ice hockey. An outdoor field hockey facility will hold 5,000 fans. A sports-themed shopping mall will connect the four indoor arenas, while hotels, condominiums, a promenade of high-end retail shops and boutiques, a health and fitness club and a sports medicine center will offer services and accommodations to residents and visitors.
The International Cricket Council, which recently moved its headquarters here from London, will open an academy in Dubai Sports City. So will the Manchester United soccer team, the Butch Harmon School of Golf and the David Lloyd Tennis Academy.
"Finally, a city within a city, powered by sports," said U. Balasubramaniam, the chief executive of Dubai Sports City.
In most places, such expansive — and expensive — plans would be unthinkable. But this is Dubai, the go-go business hub of the United Arab Emirates.
Dubai's unofficial motto is: the bigger and brasher, the better. Skyscraper after skyscraper line the Persian Gulf, with dozens more rapidly ascending into the brilliant blue sky. One, the Burj Dubai, promises to be the world's tallest, at more than 2,300 feet, although the builders will not divulge its exact height in case another country attempts to better them.
Luxury hotels abound — like the dhow-shaped Burj al Arab, where guests are anointed with oil and offered fruit when they enter the lavish lobby. And the huge shopping malls offer plenty of incongruous sights, like families enjoying Starbucks frappucinos while watching women in abayas ski down a synthetic slope.
"It's so much more cosmopolitan than anyone can imagine," said Mark Chapleski, an American who is the managing director in the Middle East for Troon Golf, the golf course management firm based in the United States that will run the Dunes at Victory Heights and oversees the Montgomerie golf club here.
This, after all, is a place where one Trader Vic's will not suffice, so revelers have a choice of two, including one in a faux Arab marketplace called Souk Madinat Jumeirah.
Major sporting events are not new to Dubai. The Dubai Tennis Championships, which made its debut in 1993, attracts many of the top players in the world, and the Dubai Desert Classic, a stop on the PGA European Tour, started in 1989. Horse racing has also enjoyed an international stage in the United Arab Emirates.
Dubai Sports City represents the latest attempt by Dubai's royal family to prepare for the day its oil reserves run out. And it is just a speck within the larger Dubailand area, where a theme park twice the size of Walt Disney World will arise. It will contain attractions like a dinosaur park, the Mall of Arabia, the Snowdome winter wonderland, which includes a revolving ski slope and iceberg-shaped hotel, and the Falcon City of Wonders (with replicas of the wonders of the world, like the pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon).
Turning the emirate into a sports and leisure destination is no different from any conglomerate's diversification efforts — except the normal rules of capitalism do not necessarily apply. "In Dubai, it's all Dubai P.L.C.," said Balasubramaniam, referring to the British corollary for Inc.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/sports/09dubai.html?ex=1147838400&en=ba920de98f7e9cb9&ei=5059&partner=AOL

to be continued....

 

[RAPTOR]

......Continued


It's Not a Mirage: Dubai Is Building a Sports Oasis



Although the partners in Dubai Sports City are private entities, the land purchase was subsidized by the government. As a result, the royal family will receive about 10 percent of the profits. And the development's plans can be scuttled at a moment's notice.
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Stephanie Kuykendal for The New York Times
When completed, Dubai Sports City will encompass 50 million square feet.



At first, the multipurpose outdoor stadium was designed to hold 25,000 people. "We were instructed to make it 60,000," Balasubramaniam said, smiling. That decision has fueled speculation that the United Arab Emirates will make a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
But the government largess has also helped attract tenants for Dubai Sports City. When Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of the International Cricket Council, first visited the site about a year ago, he could scarcely imagine that what was once in part a camel farm could house as many as 70,000 people amid all the stadiums, academies and retail stores.
Dubai is a more centrally located hub than London for countries where cricket is popular — like Pakistan, India, Australia and South Africa — and that weighed in the emirate's favor. But the chance to build and own its headquarters, run its operations tax-free and more cheaply than in London, and gain a government subsidy for relocation costs clinched the decision for the I.C.C. Access to a modern stadium devoted to cricket helped, too.
Though the building boom in Dubai has some worried about a possible real estate bubble — to fill all the new construction in the works, the emirate, with a population of about 1.4 million, will have to attract another 800,000 people by 2008 — Speed said he was reassured by the ascension of Dubai in the past five or six years.
"We've made the decision, yes, while there is some risk, it made sense bringing cricket to Dubai," Speed said.
"At this stage, I'm a convert. I hope it stays that way."
Lounging in the project's hospitality suite at the Dubai Desert Classic, Balasubramaniam — whom colleagues refer to as Bala — batted away concerns about overambition, either for Dubai Sports City or the emirate. His financing is assured. And property values, he said, are not yet overheated. "Fifty, 60 years ago, this is what was Las Vegas," he said.
The entrepreneurial spirit that built America, he added, lives on in Dubai. Sports is a multitrillion-dollar business, and Dubai, he argues, can profitably serve as the nexus between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
"Phil Knight created Nike," Balasubramaniam said. "Dubai Sports City can create a brand. Why not?"

 

[EagleEyes]

WOW! Looks like i have to visit dubai soon.

 

[RAPTOR]

It is also building the giagantic new Sports City Complex in Lahore Pakistan.

 

[RAPTOR]

Published: 05/03/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)

Shaikh Mohammad received Donald J. Trump Jr., executive vice-president of Development and Acquisitions for The Trump Organisation, at the Arabian Travel Market.
Dubai needs more mega projects: Tatweer

By Shakir Husain, Staff Reporter
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Dubai: This week's launch of the Dh100-billion Bawadi project, which will create 31 hotels and other facilities in the next eight years, has not killed Dubai's appetite for mega plans, chief of the government firm responsible for the development said yesterday.
"What we are (already) building is not enough," Saeed Al Muntafiq, chief executive officer of Tat-weer told Gulf News.
Dubai received six million tourists last year and hotel occupancy rates were reported 90 per cent. The city has set a target 15 million tourists by 2010.
"As far as our data is concerned, Dubai needs 80,000 rooms in total by 2010," Al Muntafiq said.
He said the government has many plans to bridge the gap between demand and supply of hotel accommodation.
"Bawadi is just one of those plans. There are many other projects that are in the pipeline in terms of tourism and leisure," the Tatweer chief said.
He said Bawadi, which means "deserts" in Arabic, is "a great opportunity" for the global players to come and operate the planned hotels when they are built.
In total there are three phases and the first phase is scheduled for completion by 2010.
"The first phase is going to focus on infrastructure and building hotels. The second and third phases will be predominantly investor projects. The whole project will be completed by 2016," Al Muntafiq said.
The flurry of mega projects is being supported by "so much liquidity in the region that is trying to find a home," he said.
In the last three years, 70 per cent of all investment in Tatweer's projects Dubai Healthcare City, Dubai Industrial City, Dubailand has come from the Gulf and 30 per cent from outside.
A few days ago, Abu Dhabi announced it would develop tourism projects worth Dh100 billion on Saadiyat island.
However, Al Muntafiq finds such large-scale investments inadequate to support the region's tourism growth potential.
"Tourism into the Gulf region today is fixed around one city. This has to change and this will change in the next 10 years as a result of these projects in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman and Qatar. I think this is healthy. The pie is becoming bigger, therefore, your piece of the pie, even if stays at the same percentage, is also bigger," he said.
The centrepiece of Bawadi will be the world's largest hotel, Asia-Asia. The 6,500-room hotel will be shaped like the Petronas Twin Towers of Kuala Lumpur.
Most Bawadi projects will be created in the shape of iconic buildings around the world.
Trump property to offer unique concept
Nakheel, the UAE's premier property developer, and Donald J. Trump Jr. yesterday revealed further details of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the centerpiece of The Palm Jumeirah.
The new design a collaboration between The Trump Organisation and Nakheel Hotels & Resorts was unveiled this week.
Donald J. Trump Jr., Executive vice-president of Development and Acquisitions, The Trump Organisation, commented: "The Trump International Hotel and Tower, The Palm Jumeirah, is a 48 storey mixed-use condo hotel and residence comprising a 300 room condo hotel and 360 free hold residential apartments.
The property will pioneer the condo-apartment hotel concept in the region, a concept that has been highly successful in our properties around the world.
"It will provide a unique opportunity to own an elegant and contemporary appointed hotel suite in the heart of The Palm Jumeirah, one of the world's most exciting real estate developments and destinations.
A condo-apartment serves as a convenient in-town pied-a-terre for those seeking a second or even third home, with the benefit of Trump's superlative service. When not occupied, the client will have the ability to make their suite available through the hotel's rental programme."
The Trump Organisation will have sales, marketing and management responsibility for the property, with Nakheel Hotels & Resorts responsible for development. Construction will commence late this year, and sales will begin in 2007. It is expected that the property will be completed in 2009.
Sultan Ahmad bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman of Nakheel, stated: "Dubai hotels recorded $2.15 billion in 2005, up from $1.5 billion in 2004. There are a high number of repeat visitors on both business and leisure and the condo apartment hotel concept provides the opportunity for corporations or individuals to purchase a suite, which they can use for a certain amount of the year and benefit from the profits made on it as a hotel room for the remainder of the year. Further, we expect the property to appreciate over time, creating greater asset value."