Getting to grips with the racing programme and local culture in Dubai

Dubai, the City of Gold. On January 4 we touched down here to begin the penultimate phase of Godolphin Flying Start. Getting the opportunity to spend time in Dubai learning more about the culture of the home place of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and the importance of the horse to the people of this country is very special.

As with every phase, we spent the first couple of days getting acclimatised, dealing with some jetlag and exploring the culture of this new city we would be spending the next three months in.

We spent a morning at the Sheikh Mohammed Centre For Cultural Understanding which was fantastic. We learned a lot about the Islamic religion and culture and more specifically, the culture here in Dubai. We even got to eat some traditional food and try on some traditional clothes. We took some abras (little water taxis) across Dubai creek and wandered around the spice and gold Souks in the Old Town. A city steeped in culture.

Once we were settled in our new surroundings in the Emirates Academy of Hospitality and Management campus, we focused on the thoroughbred industry. We visited some Dubai-based trainers like Saeed bin Suroor, Erwan Charpy and Satish Seemar, along with some international trainers, Simon Crisford and Doug O’Neil.

The Godolphin Flying Start second-year trainees strike a poseCredit: Lucy Blake

We have spent a lot of time at the races over the past six weeks and one of our groups goals was to visit all five racetracks in the UAE, which we completed last Saturday when we attended the meeting in Sharjah. Meydan and Jebel Ali are the only racetracks here that run mainly thoroughbred races with one Arabian race per meeting. Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Al Ain are mainly Arabian tracks that usually run one thoroughbred race per meeting.

For the first four weeks of the phase at the Meydan race meetings, all 12 of us spent each race meeting doing a rotation with each of the teams of ERA officials that work on raceday: the stewards, the handicappers, the paddock judges, clerk of the scales, placing judges, starter, track manager, vets. This was a really good chance to get behind the scenes of a race meeting and understand the work and manpower that goes into a successful race day.

Aside from going to the races and wandering around the spice souks, our days have been very busy with academic work centred around or final business plan.

Each of us have decided on one industry problem that we would like to solve and create a solution in the form of a profit-making business. We have had business planning workshops and two different marketing workshops over the past six weeks to help us develop our company’s business plan.

At the same time, we’ve been conducting customer discovery interviews with industry participants and have just begun making prototypes for our various businesses.

And last week we began an externship that leads us right up to the Dubai World Cup. I'm lucky enough to be spending my time at Green Stables with Erwan Charpy and his team.

Going to the track to watch horses work every morning, getting to know the ins and outs of each horse and understanding the racing programme and how horseracing itself is governed here in Dubai over the next six weeks will be a fantastic end to my travels with the Godolphin Flying Start programme before returning home to Ireland.

For more information on the initiative, visit the Godolphin Flying Start website