Lifestyle of a champion

It seems that you can't buy a property in the UAE these days without signing up to a whole new lifestyle concept. Forget the colour of your tiles or the size of your garden. It's a given that they'll be the best of the best, the top gun of tiles, the grandest of gardens.

Sorry that's just not good enough. How about this for an idea? You could be the parents of a future UAE-based Olympic champion if you buy one of these houses. That's one of the unique selling points of an ambitious new US$652m project to be built in Dubai.

Sign up to the amazing Dubai Lifestyle City and your kid could be the next Maria Sharapova. The statuesque blonde was there at the launch at Raffles Hotel underlining a partnership with the world famous IMG Academy, the Florida-based tennis hot-house started by coach Nick Bollettieri.

Apologising for her snuffles, she had a cold, she spoke for a few minutes about how much she owes the Bollettieri Academy where she began her transformation from gawky nine-year-old to Wimbledon champion in 1995. "Hopefully when I retire from tennis this will be the place to go. I may not be playing tennis any more but hopefully I'll be playing golf and doing other things. It will be a wonderful opportunity for people here to see what it takes to be a champion."

She mentioned the various injuries she has suffered this year and her rivalry with Justine Henin, batted off a question about drugs in the women's game, touched on her charitable foundation and the work she does with her sponsors in her infrequent downtime and sailed off surrounded by security.

"I wonder how much she was paid for that," mused one bewildered scribe.

The answer is probably nothing. She'll have been flown first class and put up at the Burj, but this time she was acting as a sort of ambassador for IMG Academies which invested in her long-term future when she was an unknown but talented youngster from Siberia. She was just paying her dues.

"You could say it's payback time, "said IMG Academies' vice president Dr Jamal Pritchard: "Maria was at the academy since she was nine years old. It's a bit like going to Harvard, you always feel loyal to your alma mater and want to support it. She's the highest paid female athlete in the world so this is not a case of endorsement. She gets paid US$5m for an endorsement."

The partnership - IMG Academies' first outside the USA - is hugely important both for Dubai Lifestyle City and for the sports facility. The development gets the USP of one of the most prestigious names in sports academies and IMG gets someone else to build them a fantastic new state-of-the-art academy that will be bigger and better than the original. "It's going to be twice the size of our Florida facility in terms of structure.

Like everything they build in Dubai they have taken it to the extreme. There are going to be seven swimming pools, one a 50-metre Olympic size pool and there'll be a special pool for women as part of cultural sensitivities.

"It's the first time in our history that we have allowed anybody to clone every aspect of our facility. We will be bringing our coaches over here and it will be even better than Florida. [Dubai Lifestyle City managing director] Mr Rahman has dug deep into his pockets. In the next 10 years we will be producing Marias in this part of the world.

"It's a huge opportunity for sport. We have produced more international athletes than any other academy in the world. The ultimate plan is to build one of these sports facilities on every continent."

Dubai Lifestyle City's Arif Rahman was coy about how much it cost him to lure IMG Academies over to Dubai but it is thought to be more than US$3m.

The idea came to him on a visit to the Bollettieri academy in Florida. "As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to bring something like that to Dubai," he said.

While he hopes that one day the Dubai academy would produce ‘the Marias of the future', the concept was originally developed in order to appeal to people who want a healthy lifestyle for their families.

"It's by far the most ambitious and the grandest challenge that we have taken on. What we are aspiring to is perfection in architecture, in a series of luxury offerings including sports facilities and lifestyle itself." Part of the sports complex will also be given over to a golf academy under the auspices of American golf guru David Leadbetter with a 220 metre range, coaching facilities and practice greens.

As well as the golf range and 10 floodlit tennis courts there will be volleyball and basketball facilities and squash courts. It will all make Dubai Lifestyle City a magnet for parents of talented young sportsmen and women who would prefer not to move their worlds to the United States. IMG Academies, who will staff the facility with top-class coaches, confidently predicts a tremendous increase in Olympians from the Gulf area.

Sprawling over an area of 4 million sq ft in Dubailand, the project will include a five-star hotel, spas and other amenities all designed by Beverly Hills-based designer Tony Ashai in a Tuscan style. Other partners in the venture include JW Marriott, Cisco and Microsoft who all share the same vision, according to Rahman.

"They share our vision which centres around the elegance of Tuscany. The architecture will be beautiful, there will be no tarred roads, just cobblestones and it will be reminiscent of renaissance Italy. There will be 68 villas and 120 villettes or apartments plus a shopping mall, a members' club and a 700-seat theatre.

Everything in the development will be equipped with the very latest in Microsoft digital technology.

Work has already started and the ETA Star Groups flagship project is expected to be completed by September 2009. "We've had tremendous enthusiasm from investors from South Africa, the UK, Russia, Pakistan and India," he said. As for the elegant Miss Sharapova, 20 years of age and already a multimillionaire, she was equally enthusiastic. "I would love to have a property here. I still have a house near Nick Bollettieri's academy in Florida and my whole experience there was incredible.

I'm really excited to have the chance to be here at the start of the Dubai project. I'm not ready to retire from tennis yet and on a daily basis I wake up in the morning and see how I feel. The most important thing is to be healthy. I have had to deal with quite a few injuries this year. Sometimes your body just says no.

But I can't complain about my life. To do what I do is incredible. "She reckons her chances of beating Justin Henin next year are good. "I have beaten her before. The thing that separates us at the moment is that she has six years more experience than I do."

As far as her lifestyle is concerned she says she's just a normal 20-year-old, albeit with an abnormally large bank balance. "Little things make me happy. I like being at home ordering pizza and gossiping with my friends and my family. It's the most fun you can have."