The Grand Camel Prix

Camel racing is touted in most UAE tour guide books as a "must see" experience for any visitor to the country. However, it is next to impossible to get information about it from anywhere. There is no designated website, I couldn't find any blogs or anything that confirmed that anybody had actually ever been to one, let alone information about a scheduled race. My theory is that the people who are actually into camel racing (mostly UAE citizens) don't have much interest in making it a big public spectacle and they figure anybody who should be at the race will generally know when it's supposed to happen. I had made three trips out into the desert to see them, but each time I was disappointed when the workers at the tracks told me they weren't happening that day.

However, the third fruitless trip, I found a printed schedule in Arabic informing me of the race days. So on my fourth visit I finally saw the races, which kick off early in the morning on weekdays, and a glorious spectacle it was.

They line the camels up:

And off they go:

Now it used to be that they had small children be the camel jockeys, usually imported from some low income south Asian country or another (Bangladesh for example). However, this inhumane practice has been replaced by robot jockeys, which are just as awesome as the name implies. They're typically small boxes with a little whip that smacks the camel's hide:

Of course, the robot must be controlled via remote, which means along side the entire dirt track there is a paved road, where a fleet of SUVs follow alongside the race with all the owners, trainers, video crews, and general camel papparazzi. Which itself is a spectacle almost as fun to watch as the camel race itself. Because the track is too big to see the majority of the race (there's a 4 km track and an 8 km track, or 2.5 and 5 miles), the video crews in the cars film the race for the excited crowd of spectators. Meanwhile an announcer, who I can only assume is the Dubai version of Marv Albert, narrates the race excitedly. Afterwards the owners all jump out of their cars and hurriedly congratulate each other on the results (the most important victory went, to nobody's surprise, to the Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan).

Then the next race begins, and at some point while the next heat is down at the far end of the track where no one can see them, the winners, adorned with flags and some kind of orange paint, are paraded out to everyone's applause:

The season is almost over for camel racing, but the nice thing about visiting the track is that on almost any morning, you can go see the camels doing their training and really get up close and personal with them.

Occasionally, you can even challenge them to a race of your own.

Coming soon to a track near you: Man v. Camel.