DOHA — As
Qatar busily prepares for the football
World Cup, many residents’ eyes this week are on its national team in padel, a
tennis-like sport that has taken the country by storm.
اضافة اعلان
Five years since
it was introduced in the tiny Gulf nation, this doubles game is now its
“fastest growing sport”, said Mohammed Saadon Alkuwari.
He is playing
for Qatar at this year’s World Championship that began a short hop away in
Dubai on Monday and finishes on Saturday.
With hundreds of
courts in public parks, commercial centers, hotels, private homes, and on
towering rooftops, the new national craze is hard to miss.
In part due to
the success of Alkuwari and his brothers, who are professional padel players,
Qatar has invested in the sport and hosted last year’s World Padel
Championship.
While the Qatar
Padel Federation, part of the national tennis association, did not provide
exact figures, Alkuwari told AFP he believes there are as many as 100,000
amateur and professional pairs in the country of 2.8 million.
At Padel In, the
club Alkuwari and his brother Khalid opened, courts now stretch over a wide
area and stay open 24 hours a day.
“We have more
than 24,000 players,” said the athlete and entrepreneur, noting an
“exceptional” rate of Qatari padelists in a country where foreigners make up
more than 80 percent of the population.
‘So much fun’
Padel is played in doubles on a court similar to tennis but smaller,
enclosed by four walls. It was created in Mexico in the 1960s and made an entry
into
Qatar in 2017.
Mohammed
Alkuwari — ranked 159 globally, making him the world’s top Arab and Asian
player — first tried it on a visit to Dubai in 2016.
“It’s a very
social sport, easy to learn, so much fun — and then you improve really fast,”
he told AFP at his club.
He got his brothers hooked, and when the family
built their first two outdoor courts in the capital Doha in the summer of 2017,
“in two weeks, they were fully booked” despite scorching heat of around 50°C.
Alkuwari, a
television presenter on beIN Sports, has also used his influence on social
media to promote the sport in Qatar.
“We as a family
... helped this sport grow” and “build a community in Qatar,” he said.
The Alkuwaris
saw a potential “on the business level but also” for new players, he recalled.
“We started to
train, we traveled, we played ... in Japan, in
America, in Europe, so people
started to see us taking it seriously,” helping others “discover” padel and
start playing too.
Mideast ‘leaders’
Many have since joined, and state-owned Qatar Sports Investments launched
its own professional tour this year, Premier Padel, which had its first edition
in Doha in March.
Qatar was meant
to host the World Championship for a second consecutive year, just weeks before
the football tournament kicks off on November 20.
But the 2022
event was moved to the
United Arab Emirates “due to some force majeure issues”,
the International Padel Federation said.
Qatar is
represented there by the men’s team, which includes Mohammed, Khalid and a
third Alkuwari brother — Abdulaziz.
The Qataris won
gold in a Middle Eastern tournament in May, but finished last out of 16
national teams that qualified for the 2021 World Championship.
“It is very
important for us to be the leaders of this sport in this region, where the
sport is growing very fast,” Mohammed said.
At this year’s
championship, facing the highly-rated Spanish, Argentinian and Brazilian teams
as well as Egypt and the UAE, “our target is to finish in the top 10.”
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