Sports Calendar

ICC officials were lured out of their armchairs in Lords’Long Room by the offer of half-price office space, generous relocation grants and high-tech cricket facilities, including the world’s first ICC Global Cricket Academy and a 30,000-seat stadium.

The Surrey-based European Golf Tour Ltd, which runs Europe’s PGA Tour, is expected to be the next sports governing body to announce it is heading for the Middle East.

Generous grants have tempted billionaire sports investors JP McManus, John Magnier and Dermot Desmond — who have financed Manchester United and bankrolled horseracing in Britain and Ireland — to sink £15m into Dubai Sports City.

The £2.5 billion, 50m sq ft development is the world’s first integrated sports city, which will feature four stadiums to provide UK sports stars with winter training facilities, as well as cricket, football, tennis and hockey academies, hotels, apartments and townhouses.

Property incentives have already persuaded British sporting champions to holiday and train in Dubai.

When the England football team stopped off in Dubai on their way to the last World Cup in Japan and South Korea, key players were given homes on the new Palm development — reclaimed islands in the shape of a giant palm tree in the Arabian Sea — in return for using their names to market Dubai as a sporting destination.

Other sports stars are paid handsomely to perform in tournaments, such as the Dubai Desert Classic, the Dubai World Cup and the Dubai Tennis Championships, which already offer the highest prize money in the world.

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Golfers Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Colin Montgomerie, tennis stars Andre Agassi, Roger Federer and Venus Williams, and jockey Frankie Dettori are Dubai regulars.

Dubai’s glamorous new sporting life marks a dramatic reversal of fortune. People sniggered back in the 1970s when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the country’s crown prince, turned up at Ascot wearing an ill-fitting top hat and tails to watch a modest filly, called Hatta, win her first race in Britain. The country he ruled was then little more than a one-camel town.

Not any more. Dubai’s rulers are creating the kind of high-tech sporting infrastructure that would make organisers of the 2012 London Olympic Games weep. The building boom has been a multi-billion-pound boost for British construction and engineering firms such as WS Atkins, Laing and McAlpine.

Paddocks and lawns are greening the desert. A snow dome is rising above the sand, so that international skiers can take to the slopes in 50C temperatures. A group of islands, arranged in the shape of the map of the world, is being built offshore to offer “round the world” sailing competitions. Five new golf courses are under construction and a new motor-racing circuit — which makes Brands Hatch look like a go-cart track — carves an oily black streak through the dunes.

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