The 2008 Championships at Wimbledon get under way on June 23rd. They’ve come a long way from the garden party atmosphere which marked the first meeting in 1877, witnessed by a few hundred spectators.

These days it’s a highly professional tournament attracting an attendance of close to 500,000 people, with players from over 60 nations competing.

More at the official Wimbledon web site, http://www.wimbledon.org

Only the strawberries and cream remain of yesteryear’s gentility at Wimbledon, but that quality is found in abundance at Henley’s Royal Regatta, which this year starts on July 2.

The event was first held in 1839 and has been held annually ever since, except during the two World Wars.

Originally staged by the Mayor and people of Henley as a public attraction with a fair and other amusements, the emphasis rapidly changed so that competitive amateur rowing became its main purpose.

The 1839 Regatta took place on a single afternoon but proved so popular with oarsmen that the racing lasted for two days from 1840. In 1886 the Regatta was extended to three days and to four in 1906.

Since 1928 its increased popularity meant entries exceeded the permitted numbers in several events, and so qualifying races are now held in the week before the Regatta to reduce the number of entries to the permitted maximum.

In 1986 the Regatta was extended to five days, with an increase in the maximum entry for certain events. 

For full details of Henley 2008, visit http://www.hrr.co.uk

It could by a major A-listed event featuring the elite of the motor racing scene, or a locally organised recreational rally.

Whichever the case, it can be a fun and entertaining way to spend a few hours or a few days. For those who are not hard-core fans here is an introductory level guide to motor racing. 

Single-seater or open-wheel racing is one of the most popular forms of motorsport, with cars designed specifically for high-speed racing. The wheels are not covered, and the cars often have aerofoil wings front and rear to enhance adhesion to the track. In Europe and Asia, open wheeled racing is commonly referred to as “Formula”, with numerous suffixes.

Formula One is the best-known variety of single-seater racing, Formula One involves an annual World Championship of around 18 races a year featuring major car and engine manufacturers, and independents such as Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz (McLaren), Williams, BMW and others.

Formula One is widely considered to be the pinnacle of motor racing.  The sport is one of the top five watched sporting events in the world and is the most expensive sport in the world, with some teams spending in excess of $400 million per year.

Touring car racing is a style of road racing that is run with production derived race cars. It often features exciting, full-contact racing due to the small speed differentials and large grids.

The Sports Car Club of America’s SPEED World Challenge Touring Car and GT championships are dominant in North America while the venerable British Touring Car Championship continues in the United Kingdom. The National Auto Sport Association also provides a venue for amateurs to compete in home-built factory derived vehicles on various local circuits.

Production car racing, known in the US as showroom stock, is an economical and rules restricted version of touring car racing, mainly to restrict costs.  One-make racing or single marque championships often employ production-based cars from a single manufacturer or even a single model from a manufacturer’s range.

Stock car racing, the North American equivalent to touring car racing, is the most-popular form of motor racing (in terms of viewership) on that continent. Usually conducted on ovals, the cars may slightly resemble production cars but are in fact purpose-built racing machines which are built to tight specifications. The largest stock car racing governing body is NASCAR.

British Stock car racing is a form of Short Oval Racing. This takes place on shale or tarmac tracks in either clockwise or anti-clockwise direction depending on the class, some of which allow contact. Races are organized by local promoters and classes depend on the promoter.

Rallying involves two classes of car. The modified Group A, production based cars and the Group N Production cars compete on (closed) public roads or off-road areas run on a point-to-point format. A rally is typically conducted over a number of “special stages” of any terrain, which entrants are often allowed to scout beforehand at reduced speeds, compiling detailed notes as they go.

Competition is based on lowest total elapsed time over the course of an event’s special stages, including penalties.

Targa is a tarmac-based road rally which is run all around the world. There are many races including Targa Tasmania, run annually since 1992. Other events around the world include the Targa Newfoundland based in Canada, Targa West based in Western Australia, Targa New Zealand and other smaller events.

Kart Racing is often seen as the entry point for serious racers into the sport. Karting can be an economical way for amateurs to try racing and is also a fully fledged international sport in its own right. World-famous F1 drivers like Michael Schumacher or Fernando Alonso and most of the typical starting grid of a modern Grand Prix took up the sport at around the age of eight, with some testing from age three.

As one of the cheapest ways to go racing, karting is seeing its popularity grow worldwide. Go-karts, or just “karts” , feature diminutive frames and wheels, but a small engine combined with very light weight make for a quick machine. The tracks are also on a much smaller scale and fans can usually see all or most of the circuit. It is a great spectator event and it’s usually affordable. 

Most forms of motor racing use a set of flags to indicate the general status of a race and to communicate instructions to competitors in a race. While the flags have changed from the first years these are generally accepted for today.

In drag racing, the objective is to complete a given straight-line distance, from a standing start with two cars going head-to-head and the winner proceeding to the next round. The distance is traditionally a quarter of a mile (400 m), or an eighth of a mile (200m). 

Vehicles range from the everyday car to the purpose-built dragster. 

In an article headlined “So Much For Beckham Being the Voice of MLS” (Major League Soccer), award winning sportswriter TJ Simmers claims he was told that Beckham was “too tired” to keep the appointment.  Fair enough, but in a city where the paparazzi outnumber the celebrities by 10-1, keeping a low profile is not always easy.

The night before the cancelled interview, Becks was seen in the early hours at a pre-Grammy party dancing up a storm with Janet Jackson. The columnist points out that Beckham, to that point, had played just eight games for the Galaxy since his move from Madrid more than six months earlier and he had managed to score just one goal in exchange for his 250 million UKP pay package.

Simmers also suggests that the only thing Beckham has really accomplished is a photo spread for an Armani underwear advert - billboards of the bare-chested Becks will soon sprout up across the US.

In a country where fans expect their sports heroes to shine on and off the field, many are sharing Simmers concerns.  Despite the mumbling, club manager Alexi Lalas and president Tim Leiweke are still gushing about the English player’s ability.

Quoted recently in People Magazine, Beckham concedes he is “incredibly disappointed” for the Los Angeles Galaxy, which failed to make the play-offs. “But we’ll come back stronger next season I’m sure,” said the British soccer star, who was sidelined by an injury for much of the season. Of playing in the final game of the season, Beckham says: “It was a great feeling to be part of the action again.”

In a recent blog entry, the Spice Boy and underwear model says: “I’ve been very busy this week, training with the Galaxy for our new season. Although it is several weeks away, we have been working extremely hard twice a day, with Ruud and the coaching staff to ensure we are fit when we play our first game against Colorado Rapids at the end of March.

“For me, this is going to be my first full season with the Galaxy and I am really looking forward to it. We have improved our squad of players this winter so we will also be looking to improve on last season. Next Monday (Feb 18) we leave for Hawaii and the Pan Pacific tournament, which everybody is looking forward to. The opening game is against Japanese side Gamba Osaka so we’ll definitely be looking to try and build up our match fitness from thereon.”

Fabio Capello left out Beckham when he announced his provisional list of 30 players for the February exhibition match against Switzerland at Wembley Stadium. (England won the match) Capello, who was hired in December, said he omitted Beckham because the Galaxy midfielder hasn’t played a competitive match since November. The Italian did say he would give Beckham another chance to make the team if the former England captain shows good form when the Major League Soccer season restarts in the spring.

After the initial euphoria that surrounded the Beckham’s arrival in LA, things seem to have chilled. To document the family’s move to America, Victoria signed a deal with the NBC network to do six half-hour episodes of a reality TV series, but that was trimmed to a single, one-hour episode because there just wasn’t the material or the viewer interest.  Critics at the New York Post described it as “an orgy of self-indulgence”, describing Beckham as “vapid and condescending”. Ouch!

In America, where the typical household receives 100+ channels on the telly, many of them offering professional sports, Beckham will have to manage a lot more than one goal in the upcoming season to justify either his massive pay cheque or the outpouring of fan adulation that accompanied his arrival.

While it may be a bit premature to issue any definitive predictions on medal counts, there’s one prediction you can take to the bookie, the weather in Beijing come August is going to be stiflingly hot and humid with pollution counts that could cause problems for some outdoor athletes.

Beijing organisers have enlisted the support of an IBM supercomputer to provide hourly forecasts on a square kilometre basis, making it easier to plan for weather disruptions at specific venues. The 80-node p575, as it is known, is worthy of Olympic Gold, performing 9.8 trillion operations per second.

While the super computer will be able to predict the weather, a cloud-size question mark hangs over pollution levels. So how serious is the pollution? On a normal day, Beijing’s pollution exceeds by nearly five times the safety benchmark set by the World Health Organization.

At least one marquee athlete, world record-holder Haile Gebrselassie (pictured) is considering skipping the marathon. The Ethiopian distance great could still try to compete in the shorter 10,000 meters, an event in which he has won two Olympic gold medals already. Gebrselassie would be a favourite in the marathon , but his manager is worried about heat stroke, which can leave lasting damage for an athlete.

The management team looked into the hottest marathon races over the past 20 years and found that many of the top finishers never really recovered for the rest of their careers. Gebrselassie dropped out of the London Marathon last April because of breathing problems related to his pollen allergy.

In an effort to cut pollution, Chinese authorities plan to shut down factories and take cars off Beijing’s streets during the Olympics. Beijing’s coal-burning factories, power plants and vehicles regularly spew enough fumes to shroud the city in a brown, pungent haze. Residents have become accustomed to the soot that coats their clothes. Some wear surgical masks when outdoors.

In other pre-Olympic news, American sprint champion Justin Gatlin recently launched an appeal of his four-year doping suspension in an attempt to return to the track for the August games. The notice was filed with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the international body that has the final say in such matters. 

In January a U.S. arbitration panel reduced the 25-year-old sprinter’s potential eight-year ban to four, but Gatlin wants a further reduction. He tested positive for excessive levels of testosterone at the Kansas Relays in 2006, his second doping offence. The first came in 2001 when Gatlin tested positive for amphetamines, part of a prescribed medication he was taking for attention deficit disorder.

On the political side of the games The International Olympic Committee has rejected an attempt by Tibet to field its own team in Beijing. In January delegates from the unofficial Tibetan National Olympic Committee met with Olympic at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, as more than 100 supporters, including some Buddhist monks, waved banners and Tibetan flags outside. 

A rule change in 1996 means only national committees from countries recognized by the international community can take part in the Olympics. A special exemption is granted only to those territories whose national committees were recognized before 1996, such as those for the Palestinian territories, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which competes as Chinese Taipei.

While athletes fight to qualify and backroom brawls take place over legal and political issues, what’s in store for Olympic tourists? The capital’s long-stated goal of having English-speaking taxi drivers in time for the event seems no more than a pipe dream. Beijing’s cabbies are among the rudest and most ignorant in China, a situation that has seen little progress in the last 10 years. Barring a raid on local universities’ English departments and a fast course in driving and Beijing geography, would-be Olympic visitors should bring phrase books and stick to public transportation as much as possible.

Olympic merchandise is everywhere, and China’s media buzzes with mentions of the games. China’s medal hopefuls, like hurdler Liu Xiang and diver Guo Jingjing, were snapped up by sponsors long ago, and their images adorn Coke cans, tissue boxes andjust about everything else. One can’t help but wonder if the Olympic ideal will be lost in the smog and the hype. 

They can certainly expect a rather different person from his immediate predecessor. If not with the fans, Steve McClaren was always popular with his players for his chummy, boot room manner. One of the lads.

Quite what Lampard, Crouch and the rest of them will make of his successor - art collector, opera buff, travel connoisseur - is anyone’s guess.

Of course, to some extent, we’ve been here before. The FA and friendly journalists were only too keen to play up the cultural credentials of one Sven-Goran Eriksson upon his appointment in the same job. And we all know how that ended up, don’t we?

Capello and his Italian backroom boys are being offered a similar king’s ransom in the expectation that they can propel the nation from gutsy losers to world superstars.

So how will it be different this time? The line we’re being sold by the pundits is that, unlike the two previous occupants of the post, Capello won’t make the mistake of getting too friendly with any particular players.

Contenders will have to earn their place in the squad through effort, not by some assumed, God-given right to appear on the teamsheet.

We shall see. One thing which is undeniable is Capello’s record as a coach - guiding teams to nine European league championships as manager of Juventus, AC Milan, Real Madrid, Roma and AC Milan.

While that’s a record no home-grown England manager could hope to approach (McClaren included), let us not forget that Eriksson also arrived at the FA with a similarly impressive track record in Europe’s top flights.

The difference is that unlike league managers, national coaches can’t buy their way up the quality ladder. We already know that the players featuring in the last two dozen games for England probably represent the zenith of current achievers who are qualified to wear the Three Lions.

Can a good manager improve them, mould them into something better? Undoubtedly. Could he take them to the final stages of the World Cup (and even a semi-final appearance would scarcely do for some of the team’s most fanatical and unrealistic supporters)? Probably not, if we’re honest with ourselves.

Look at the number of non-British players currently plying their trade in the Premier League. Now compare that figure with the number of Brits playing in the top flights elsewhere. No, Mr Beckham, LA Galaxy doesn’t count, I’m afraid. The numbers speak for themselves.

The Brits consider that, having invented the game, we have some divine right not only to regularly appear in the finals of top international competitions, but also to win them. The problem is, no-one appears to have explained that rule to the rest of the world’s footballing nations.

Signor Capello appears to have his work cut out for him…

At one time speaking and learning English was frowned upon in Communist China. Now people are queueing up to take English immersion courses. Despite the surge in interest in learning to speak English, visitors who stray off the main Olympic map will still find it almost impossible to order a meal or book a hotel room without an interpreter.

With 1,000 new cars being registered in the capital every day, the authorities have a serious pollution problem. There are now three millions cars on Beijing’s streets. The authorities are expected to take one million of them off the streets during the games through licence plate restrictions. Despite rising expenditure on pollution control, Beijing is facing increasing problems as its booming economy never slows its pace.

But the International Olympic Committee admits it may have to postpone endurance events like the marathons or cycling road races if pollution levels are too high. This is a city with more ring roads than there are Olympic rings.

Pollution and human rights will likely to be the two main issues on which the world’s media will focus next summer. The officials in the Beijing organising committee are going to need those newly-acquired English skills to explain the intricacies of both.

During her fact-finding visit to Beijing recently, the UK’s Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell said it was crucial that foreign journalists are given the right to report freely from the games, both during the games and beyond.

The Chinese authorities say they have established a special military unit to provide security for the Beijing Olympics next year. The unit, drawn from the army, navy and air force, will confront terror threats and help in the event of any disasters.

A senior official from the unit, Tian Yixiang, said the games’ organisers faced a complicated security situation. He told military attaches from 54 countries that Beijing had to be fully prepared for unconventional terror threats of a kind China had not experienced before - including chemical and biological attacks. Tian said the special military unit would be better equipped and have greater capabilities than the security forces at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

Beijing has also issued further rules to make sure taxi drivers present a good image to foreign visitors. The city authorities have issued rules banning taxi drivers from shaving their heads or growing beards. In April the drivers were told not to eat, spit or smoke in their taxis and women drivers were warned to keep their hair tidy and avoid extravagant earrings.

Even Chinese meteorologists said they had plans in place to prevent it raining during key Olympic events by using aircraft to carry out cloud seeding.

There is a lot more at stake during the games than gold, silver and bronze. Beijing’s Games could generate up to $16m USD in profit, according to state media. Since the Los Angeles Games, most hosts have struggled to break even as costs have soared.  But efficient Beijing marketing chiefs have deals with 10 domestic sponsors and 11 global companies.

A spokesman for the Games says “We would like to see $1bn in sponsorships but there is much to do to reach that figure,” Los Angeles set a record profit of $220m when it hosted the 1984 Olympics. Beijing’s forecast operating budget is about $2bn, owing to heightened security concerns. But Chinese organisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are confident that sum will be more than clawed back, and have set a profit target of $16m.

Profits from sales of products bearing the recently released five mascots of the Beijing Games, the “Friendlies”, could reach as high as $300 million. To stage the last Olympics, Athens set a budget of $2.4bn, but ended up spending more than nine billion euros, making the 2004 Games the most expensive in history. Beijing has vowed to come in below Athens’ operating budget, but is likely to have to spend far more - about $40bn - to get the Chinese capital’s infrastructure ready to host the Games.

In subsequent editions of UAEasy.com we’ll look at some of the Olympic venues, and feature some of the athletes who will likely figure prominently in the Beijing games.

For an entrance fee of Dhs120 you get a goodie bag, T=shirt, shower facilities, post-race breakfast and trophy presentation.

All finishers will also receive a medal and entry into a prize raffle, including two return air tickets from Dubai to the wonderful South African city of Cape Town, courtesy of SAA.

The race is on 7th December and starts at 7am. For more information check out the club’s website at http://www.dubaicreekstriders.com

His comments came in a remarkable attack on the state of the English game, and its players diets.

Malouda, 27, (pictured) who signed from Lyon for £13m in the summer said: “Training sessions are terrifying. They are maximum intensity, and you go flat out.
“During actual matches, it is as though everybody’s brains are switched off.

“People play by instinct, how they did when they first discovered football.”

Malouda also said he was amazed that English players can eat “whatever you like, drink Coke or anything”.

“It is a good job I have come over here at the age of 27 and so have not been following the same diet as the rest of the club’s players,” he added.

The French international has been out of action for a month with a knee injury but appears less than enthusiastic about returning for the busy Christmas fixture schedule.

He said: “I have been warned about the Christmas periods in English football. They sound terrible.”

Whether you’re a beginner or just looking to brush up on those riding skills, everyone can book a 45-minute private riding lesson for just AED 100 per person.

Family and friends can enjoy watching from specially designed viewing areas.  Long trousers and shoes with a small heel are recommended. 

For more information, please contact Club Joumana Reception on 04 883 6000 or e-mail jagrs@jaihotels.com

Four hour fishing trips at the Jebel Ali Golf Resort & Spa start from AED 1,750 per trip for seven people, including a captain, tackle, croissants and soft drinks. 

For the perfect end to your excursion you can ask the Chef at Club Joumana Sports Café to prepare your catch of the day. 

For more information, please contact Club Joumana Reception on 04 883 6000 or e-mail jagrs@jaihotels.com .