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By Shane McGinley
The Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships celebrated its 25th anniversary this year and has risen to become one of the top tournaments in the world, but cultural and funding challenges mean the United Arab Emirates has yet to produce a world class player, according to one of the emirate’s top tennis officials.
World number one player Andy Murray won his first title of 2017 with a victory over unseeded Spaniard Fernando Verdasco at the tournament on Saturday, with the Scotsman walking away with a prize of $523,330. (Read more here)
The tournament’s wildcard this year was Emirati player Omar Al Awadi. The Dubai native made his 13th appearance at the tournament but was once again knocked out in the first round.
The event celebrated its 25th anniversary this year and has risen to become one of the top tennis tournaments on the circuit, but it has yet to see a local Emirati player claim the top prize and follow in the footsteps of champions like as Britain’s Andy Murray, Switzerland’s Roger Federer, Serbia’s Novak Djokovic or Spain’s Rafael Nadal.
“It is a tricky question to answer,” Salah Tahlak, executive vice president of corporate services at Dubai Duty Free, director of the tournament and a board member of Tennis Emirates, the governing body for tennis in the UAE, said when asked why the country had not yet produced a top tennis player.
“The culture itself is still not gearing into tennis. I think number one is the funding. We don’t get enough from the Ministry of Sport and we don’t have enough courts, we don’t have enough coaches, so again you are talking about the money,” he said on Friday during a panel discussion at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature to launch the new book ‘Game, Set and Dubai: A Quarter Century of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships’.
“The main focus of the UAE sport is soccer and I would say 90 percent of the budget goes into the soccer and I am always challenging them and telling them that we have more achievements than soccer,” he added.
In addition to funding challenges, Tahlak said Emirati players face cultural issues and a lack of support from their families, who often urge them to focus on their studies instead of sport.
“You get to a situation where it is tennis or your studies, this is another challenge they are facing,” he said, adding that the cultural challenges were especially prevalent for female players.
“The third one is the ladies and the culture, they are not used to seeing them in shorts and t-shirts to play in front of the people. We have to work hard to make it happen as we have one of the top 10 tournaments in the world and we are not taking advantage of it.”
According to the ATP World Tour website, there are no Emirati players listed in the official rankings. Dubai-born Al Awadhi had reached a career high of number 805 in August 2003 and the 35 year-old has won $111,961 in prize money during his career, according to the ATP website.
© Zawya 2017
