Summer appears to have come early in the UAE, but April can be hot. We know it. We can’t really complain about it. The average high temperature in April in Abu Dhabi is 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Warmer than most humans prefer. The summer which, for practical purposes we have entered, also is the time of […]

[Read more →]

Dubai International Airport has moved up to No. 2 in the world for international departures. Thus, if you travel enough, even from the United States, the likelihood is increasing that you will land in Dubai. This is not hard to figure out. Asia’s east and its subcontinent have been the sites of much of the […]

[Read more →]

I am not too obstinate — OK, sometimes I am — to concede when I got one wrong. Or at least partly wrong. In January, I was certain David Beckham had picked the wrong club to join for the “one last challenge” he spoke of when he left the L.A. Galaxy, in December. That club […]

[Read more →]

Searching my memory, but I am not sure I had really grasped, pre-UAE, that the main event of the Dubai World Cup offered the biggest cash prize of any horse race/meet. The race is worth $10 million, with $6 million going to the winner. That’s a lot of oats and alfalfa. The Dubai World Cup […]

[Read more →]

Rene Douglas wasn’t the best jockey around. He was not Eddie Arcaro, or Bill Shoemaker or Chris McCarron or Gary Stevens. But he was good. Quite good. Good enough to have won more than 3,500 races, including the 1998 Belmont Stakes and the Juvenile Fillies race at the 2006 Breeders’ Cup. Then came a horrific […]

[Read more →]

Maybe we should have seen this coming. A guy doesn’t win the Formula One drivers championship three consecutive years by being a milquetoast. But that didn’t keep those of us who follow F1 — which is most of world aside from North America — from having a general idea of Sebastian Vettel, the German driver […]

[Read more →]

Back in December, I confessed to my deep and only semi-rational need to see Adrian Peterson fall short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season NFL rushing record. (And he did, in part because I willed it; that’s how fans think.) Here’s one I probably care about more: The Lakers’ NBA record of 33 consecutive victories.

[Read more →]

This is a fairly big deal, over here in the Old World. Well, at least in the parts of the Old World that care about rugby, and that would include the British Isles and (go figure) France and Italy. Each winter, they stage a Six Nations competition in which six “national” teams play each other, […]

[Read more →]

I have suggested on this blog that college sports are hard to follow, overseas. They are. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the notion of “sports” affiliated with “college” does not seem ridiculous. Thus, once you leave the U.S., you are confronted with confusion and disinterest, as pertains to […]

[Read more →]

The London Times once had the same reputation in Britain that the New York Times has in the States. The emphasis here being “once” … as in “bygone days”. Britons were clearly proud of it. And still are, almost instinctively. They refer to it still as “The Times” … as if there is only one […]

[Read more →]