Dubai: Sports Playground for the Ultra-Rich

"The sheikh is like Dubai Inc., and he's the CEO," he says. "He will empower everyone around him to make his city like New York. He's willing to do whatever he can. They're rich and Sheikh Mohammed is trying to make everyone in his whole city wealthy. I really believe that he will allow people to go for their vision. That's why they're doing things that are beyond belief."

Vatterott says that when he first met Mohammed: "I was definitely out of place. I was very, very nervous. He would enter the room and make me feel instantly comfortable.

"He doesn't have an ego. Everyone around him has a huge ego. He wears a very basic Swiss Army watch. He has all these palaces, but he doesn't sleep there. He'll go sleep with the horses in more modest dwellings, while his wives and family will be in the bling."

Well, that would certainly explain the air conditioning in the stables. Although, if Sheikh Mo doesn't have an ego, why are there murals of him covering the entire sides of skyscrapers?

Racing's Brave New World: Robots on Camels

A trainer blares the horn in a white SUV and drives alongside a lone camel galloping down the dusty race track. This is a training day, and the camel is being put through its paces on the long Nad Al Sheba course. The camel is running on its own without a jockey.

Hold on, it's not running alone. As the camel races closer to the covered grandstand, I can see -- what the hell? -- a small, remote-controlled robot jockey on the camel's back, slapping its little whip against the camel's flanks. It looks like an overgrown sock monkey.

Camel racing has a long tradition in Arab nations, but the sport drew worldwide condemnation because of the use and abuse of small, underage boys as jockeys. HBO's "Real Sports" detailed the brutal conditions in an award-winning 2004 broadcast, the U.S. State Department cited the abuse in a report on the U.A.E., and Anti-Slavery International said boys as young as 4 were "deprived of food and water to keep them light." ASI also claimed the government had turned a blind eye to the abuse, declining to enforce its own laws prohibiting the use of underage jockeys. A group filed a class-action suit last year in Florida against Sheikh Mohammed and the royal family over their possible involvement. Lawyers for the royal family told The New York Times that the suit is baseless, and the paper reported that a judge will decide within a month whether the case may proceed.

The U.S. State Department reports that the U.A.E. has made significant progress in eliminating the problems. Dubai also introduced the robot jockeys two years ago to replace the boys. The first jockeys were modeled after humans (one guidebook compared them to C-3PO dressed as a jockey), but those gave way to the smaller and lighter (five to six pounds) robots now used. The robots haven't completely replaced human jockeys -- some camel trainers remain old school -- and enough controversy still surrounds the sport that race schedules aren't so much announced as spread on a Fight Club-type circuit: News gets around to the right people by word of mouth.

Of course, even robot jockeys seem tame compared with the construction visible beyond the track.

Cranes work atop a cluster of a dozen buildings ranging as high as 40 and 60 stories, with one, the Burj Dubai, towering far above them all. The Burj Dubai will be the tallest building in the world when completed, though no one outside of the developers knows exactly how tall that is … and the developers aren't saying. You hear a lot of rumors about the Burj Dubai. It is growing at a floor a day. … No, construction has halted while the developers wait to see how tall a building in another country will be so that they can be certain to make the Burj Dubai taller. … It will be 2,300 feet high. It will be 160 stories high. … No, an image on its official Web site shows a graphic of an elevator button for a 194th floor. According to the Web site, the Burj Dubai is already at least 120 floors and 1,450 feet high and, from the comparisons shown, it appears it will be twice as high as the Empire State Building.

And this is only one slice of Dubai's vast construction. Trucks and cement mixers shuttle 24/7 on and off Palm Islands, a series of man-made islands in the shape of a giant palm tree (with a total land mass larger than Manhattan) due for completion next year. Another project under way, The World, will be a series of 250 more such islands forming the shape of -- what else? -- the Earth's continents. There is Dubai Sports City, Meydan horse city and Dubailand theme park. There is even a skyscraper that will rotate approximately 50 degrees a day to eventually give every resident the same view in the course of a week.

People think Las Vegas is growing fast? Dubai is Vegas on steroids.

And to think that 50 years ago, Dubai was nothing more than a town of several thousand people and a few scattered buildings surrounded by sand and desert. As recently as 1981, the population was only 250,000. It has swelled to 1.3 million now, with thousands more pouring in every month.

"We used to come here back when there was only one road and nobody on it," says Mark Johnston, who has been training horses for Sheikh Mohammed since the mid-'90s. "The Trade Center was the landmark. There was nothing else around."

If the Seattle SuperSonics asked Dubai to build them a $500 million arena, it would respond: Great. How high do you want the sky suites?

Even Dubai Has an Underclass

"Great. Now we have to wait another hour for the next race," a British woman in her early 20s complains along the rail as she watches Vengeance of Rain sprint past for a win. "I am sooooo bored."

"Mummy has bought us a bottle of champagne," the young man next to her says. "Let's go see Mummy."

While these expats go see "Mummy" in the Bubble Lounge on the north side of Nad Al Sheba, native men in rich ivory robes watch the races attentively from the reserved seating section across from the finish line. A far different group crowds the south side. Admission to this section of the track is free and thousands crowd the grandstand and the infield. Families sit with legs crossed, studying the race card. Women in black abayas stroll by with their children. Men in dishdashas blue jeans, T-shirts, Arab headwear and baseball caps review their Pick Seven choices. A few entrepreneurs offer cigarettes for sale, spreading their packages on the ground.

Mummy hasn't bought any champagne for these fans.

These are largely the foreign workers who come from all over south Asia and north Africa, the ones who work the low-pay service and construction jobs that keep Dubai growing. They are here for the horse races, a cheap night out and the slim hope of winning the Pick Seven. Betting on the horses is illegal, but the free Pick Seven is not. Pick all seven winners on the card correctly and you take home $14,000. The odds, of course, are astronomical, but $14,000 can represent four hard years of wages for some of these workers, who live in overcrowded work compounds outside Dubai. They bus in early each morning, six days a week, some riding two hours each way in the heavy traffic.