In the suite of British sports, Formula One auto racing is something like the No. 4 competition. Behind soccer, cricket and rugby … but not much else. They don’t seem to mind that the sport is shockingly dull and depressingly predictable, featuring entire races in which the pole-sitter is never headed. One team tends to […]

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Gulf airlines always are looking for new ways to gild the lily. First class? Not good enough, for the mega-rich. Kind of down-market, really. So we have something better for you, at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways. This is on the mammoth A380 only, for those who like to spend $20,000 on themselves to fly — […]

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These next five days are crucial in the history of UAE soccer. What looked like one of the best teams in Asia, a year ago, probably needs to win twice at home — versus Palestine tomorrow and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday — just to make the final round of continental qualifying for the Russia 2018 […]

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Most of us know almost nothing about anything. We get things wrong all the time. We jump to conclusions. We get facts mixed up. We hear it wrong in the first place. But compared to professional weather forecasters, we are all prophets inspired by Providence. In theory, we long ago entered an age in which […]

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When I left Southern California for Abu Dhabi, in October of 2009, UCLA’s basketball program wasn’t John Wooden-esque, but it was solid. Respectable. The Bruins had made the NCAA tournament 19 of the previous 21 seasons, and added their 11th national championship during that span. Wooden had won 10 championships in 12 seasons, ending in […]

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Leave it to Lionel Messi to do something that will have soccer fans buzzing for a day or three. In this case, it was a semi-controversial move: A penalty kick that he did not aim at goal, instead knocking it sideways to Barcelona teammate Luis Suarez, who subsequently scored. Some were amazed and giddy at […]

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  Eating with American fast-food giant McDonald’s may be a bad idea, in terms of consumption, but I continue to be impressed by their schemes for trying to localize their menu. To wit: The McArabia, in the UAE. The American Winter menu, here in France. This is fairly ingenious.

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Luckily for me, a French music TV station has the free-to-air rights to Super Bowl 50 and will be showing the game live at 12:30 local time tonight/tomorrow morning. Why does station W9 bother with the championship of American football? The French sports newspaper L’Equipe asked that question, and others, of the director general of […]

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For 2.5 years I sat across from an Englishman who detested Ashley Cole, who at the time was a left back with Chelsea. My coworker inevitably would get around to paraphrasing the quotes from Cole’s biography, My Defence, in which the player said he was “trembling with anger” in the summer of 2006 when his […]

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I must first have noticed the city of Sete on the map, where the Languedoc region of southern France creeps down to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Sete is near the southern end of a confused stretch of French coastline, where land gives way to water and back again from west of Marseille almost […]

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