Huge potential in sports tourism, says Oman Sail CEO
MUSCAT: Sports tourism has a huge potential to grow in the country and generate tourism, revenue, and a healthier lifestyle, according to David Graham, chief executive officer of Oman Sail.
“Tanfeedh and the Ministry of Tourism (MoT) have a very indepth strategy and their main tar- gets are special interest groups or the adventure and sports tourists, and sports tourism is on a huge upward curve. “So that is a market, which has seen growth and the country really lends itself to certain sports—sailing, running, cycling, mountain biking, triathlon—those kinds of sports can be practiced here,” he said.
Currently, the core sporting activities which are being focused on, are running, cycling, triathlon, sailing, trail running, mountain biking, equestrian, camel racing and fishing.
Although the country is only focusing on a few sporting activities for the moment, this is only because they want to narrow them down and grow big. “The scope (sports tourism) is huge and that’s why we are just focusing on so few sports right now, it’s not exclusive to those sports, but we are doing that so we can shortlist and focus on them.”
“We were asked to go to Tanfeedh, and I was working on an initiative on how sports events can benefit the country, and since then I am leading the initiative to implement what we discussed in the labs; for example, the Muscat Marathon was a Tanfeedh initiative, it was managed through a partner- ship among Muscat Road Runners, Oman Sail and Tanfeedh, because we don’t have the technicalities of running, but they do, so they bring in that and we bring to that party the branding, marketing, logistics and event management, financing and accounting. We got 1,350 runners this year, and plan to double that up for next year.”