Camel racing is a billion-dollar industry today
Like horse-racing elsewhere in the world, camel racing in the UAE is fiercely competitive, says writer Melissa van Maasdyk, and the prestige attached to the season’s final races are on par with that of the Gold Cup at Ascot or the Kentucky Derby.
But, if both are billion-dollar industries today, horse-racing might be seen as elitist, whereas camel-racing is something most Emiratis can identify with given that because, until as recently as the 1960s, these hardy animals were the main form of transport and vital to survival.
“The relationship of Emiratis and camels goes deep; camel racing is a way of preserving their reliance on these animals that basically kept them alive in the past,” says Alex Tinson, Head Veterinarian of Abu Dhabi’s Hilli Embryo Transfer and Surgery Centre.
“It’s a way of saying, ‘This animal was so important to us that we will put it on a pedestal, look after it, learn more about it and race it.”’
Alex came to Abu Dhabi in the late ‘80s on the invitation of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who was then Crown Prince, with the mandate to ‘make the President’s camels the best in the Gulf ’.
Prior to that, he had been working as a vet in his homeland Australia, where, in 1988, he was enlisted as Chief Camel Vet for the Great Australian Camel Race, held in the Northern Territory.
Covering 3,300 kilometres over three months, the race and Alex’s important role in it came to the attention of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, who duly hired him to help them improve the performance of their own racing camels, which were being outshone by those of their neighbours.
“The rivalry between countries, emirates and cities is amazing,” says Alex. “We joke that when the big races are on, particularly between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, it’s like a war and winning that Gold Sword at the final race on the final day is everything.”
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Alex’s first task on arrival was to set up a camel hospital and research centre in Al Ain, along with two other vets. But, for starters, he needed to observe the President’s camels in action.
“I’ll never forget the day I saw my first race here,” he says. “We arrived in Al Wathba early in the morning and sat down in a tent beside the track. Then we watched Bedouins arriving in old trucks with camels in the back, followed by smart cars carrying sheikhs, and finally, a procession of military vehicles, along with a limousine, and out got Sheikh Zayed himself.”
Alex describes the UAE’s visionary founder as ‘the driving force behind camel racing’, which Zayed regarded as a vital way to preserve Bedouin culture and to distribute oil wealth beyond the city limits. “Camel racing is like this giant social-security system, in which petro-dollars are rotated among camel racers,” he says.
“If a farmer has a fast camel, for example, he could sell it to one of the sheikhs and that money then comes back to that tribe, enabling them to buy more camels and so it goes.”
While betting is prohibited by Islam, money also exchanges hands in the form of substantial cash prizes, and Alex remembers that even at that first event, the winner of every race was rewarded with a new four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Back then, the industry was still developing, which, he says, was reflected by a rudimentary single dirt track with no barrier or starting gate and very little science involved. It was simply a race to the finish and a good day out for all.
Today, it’s a highly technical, widely televised sport, featuring robotic jockeys (since the UAE outlawed live ones in 2002 to eliminate the potential use of children). These tiny stainless-steel riders are operated by owners as they follow their camels on roadways along the inside of the track, urging them on via two-way radios and small remote-controlled whips.
As for the stars of the show, Alex says their performance has improved by 40 per cent since the early ‘90s, whereas horses have run at around the same speed for the past 50 years.
He feels privileged to have contributed to this progress through extensive research and innovation, which has included revolutionising training techniques, developing a successful embryo transfer programme (in which surrogate camels are used to carry and bring to birth the embryos of high-performing female camels, fertilised by the best male camels) and, finally, cloning.
“As a consequence of our research, we have created Jurassic camels,” he says, referring to a project in which he collaborated with famous Korean expert Professor Wang to clone one of the UAE’s best camels ever.
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This involved using the preserved tissue of a huge black camel, which had won many beauty pageants before dying 10 years previously, to produce 11 identical baby camels.
“I think Sheikh Zayed would be blown away by the level of cutting-edge science that is being achieved here,” Alex says. “He set the benchmark and his sons have taken it to the next level.”
Returning to the track, Alex and his team had their first real breakthrough in 1996 when one of their camels won a Gold Cup at the annual Racing Festival. Divided between Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar, this prestigious tournament runs from January to March, culminating in the Golden Sword race, with hundreds of thousands of dirhams in prize money at stake, along with new cars such as Range Rovers, Mercedes and Lamborghinis.
“But this race is about much more,” Alex writes in his engaging autobiographical book The Camel Vet. “This is a contest for supremacy in an ancient art.”
Much as Bedouins were once defined by the number of camels they possessed, today, owning the fastest camel is what counts, and in 2013, this honour finally fell to Abu Dhabi, when a female called Theeba won the coveted prize.
“Theeba’s win capped a meeting where we won 10 of the 16 Gold Cups up for grabs,” Alex writes. “We’d taken out the Golden Sword and smashed the track record. That all this happened in our hometown of Abu Dhabi made it all the sweeter.”
While there have many more triumphs since then, Alex regards that day as the pinnacle of his career because it was then that he finally felt he’d earned the trust placed in him by Sheikh Khalifa all those years before.
Camel racing takes place on weekends between October and March.
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