Camel racing is the sport the Gulf built for itself. Every Gulf state has purpose-built tracks, a season that runs from October to April, festivals with royal patronage and prize funds in cars and cash that rival the Dubai World Cup, and a broadcast audience on Dubai Racing, Al Rayyan and Saudi channels every weekend of the winter. It is also the one Arab sport on which no sportsbook we list offers a market, and this page is honest about that from the first line: if you came here looking for camel racing odds, the books do not have them, and we explain why rather than pretend otherwise. The Arabic betting hub covers the sports the books do price; the football page and the horse racing page cover the two that take most Arab betting money.
The ranking above lists the sportsbooks we send traffic to for the rest of the Gulf season. None of them prices camel racing, and the toplist title says so.
The sport
Camel racing as an organised sport dates from the 1970s, when the ruling families of the Emirates and Qatar formalised what had been a Bedouin pastime into a calendar with tracks, categories and prize money. Races are run on sand tracks of 4 to 10 kilometres, most of them oval, with the camels released from a starting gate and the trainers following in a convoy of 4x4s on a parallel service road. Fields can be large, sixty camels or more in the early rounds of a festival, and the categories are set by age and sex, from the youngest camels in the shortest races to the mature animals in the ten-kilometre features.
Robot jockeys. Until 2005 the riders were children, many trafficked from South Asia and Sudan; the UAE and Qatar banned the practice that year under international pressure and the robot jockey replaced them within two seasons. The robot is a small frame strapped to the camel's back with a mechanical whip and a two-way radio, controlled by the trainer from the 4x4 alongside; the trainer talks to the camel through the speaker, which is why the convoy hugs the rail at 40 kilometres an hour. It changed the sport's image abroad and did nothing to its appeal at home.
Prizes. The big festivals award cars, land cruisers by the dozen, and cash in sums that run to tens of millions of dirhams across a festival, together with the golden sword, the golden dagger and the other trophies that give the finals their names. Ownership sits with the ruling families, with major merchant families and with a growing number of private stables in Saudi Arabia and Oman; a champion camel changes hands for sums that match a Group 1 racehorse.
The tracks and the season
| Track | Country | Season highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Al Marmoom | Dubai, UAE | Weekend meetings October to April; Al Marmoom Heritage Festival in March and April, the season's finale |
| Al Wathba | Abu Dhabi, UAE | Sheikh Zayed festival; the largest prize fund in the Emirates |
| Al Shahaniya | Qatar | Qatar's national track; the Crown Prince and Amir festival finals in the second half of the season |
| Kabd | Kuwait | Kuwait Camel Racing Club's track; winter Friday meetings and the Amir's Cup |
| Sakhir | Bahrain | Royal Camel Racing Club meetings on the Sakhir desert track through the winter |
| Al Fulaij | Oman | The Sultanate's principal track under the Royal Camel Corps; the Royal Cup |
Saudi Arabia races at tracks across the Kingdom, with the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival at Rumah, north of Riyadh, in December and January the largest camel event in the world by entries and prize fund, and the Crown Prince Camel Festival at Taif in late summer the one exception to the winter calendar. Yemen shares the sport, and Yemeni camels and trainers are a fixture at the Saudi and Omani meetings.
Meetings start at dawn, because the camels run in the cool, and a morning's racing at Al Marmoom is over by nine. The season opens in October with the age-category qualifiers, builds through the winter and finishes with the festival finals in March and April; the Yemen, Oman and Kuwait pages note the local meetings in each country's sporting calendar.
Why the books do not price it
We checked the sportsbooks we list and found no camel racing market at any of them. That is not an oversight by the 1x-platform books, which price everything from table tennis to esports; it is structural, and the reasons are worth setting out because they explain why the occasional affiliate page promising "camel racing odds" is either describing a one-off novelty market or inventing one.
- No data feed. Bookmakers price and settle from data suppliers who cover a sport with live timing, official results and a form archive. No supplier covers camel racing, and the results published by the clubs are lists of winners and prize allocations rather than a settleable form.
- Fields and distances. A bookmaker can model a twelve-runner horse race over 2,000 metres. A sixty-camel field over 8 kilometres, with qualifiers, eliminations and rounds that reshuffle the entries between heats, cannot be priced with any confidence and would be exploited by the few people who know the camels.
- Ownership. The best camels are owned by the ruling families and the major stables, the trainers control the robot jockeys from the cars, and there is no independent stewarding of the kind racing regulators impose to protect a betting market. A book that opened a market would be pricing a contest whose participants know far more than it does.
- No lawful audience. The people who follow camel racing live in the Gulf, where they cannot lawfully bet, and the offshore books' international customers do not follow it. There is no market to serve.
- Tradition. The sport was never built around betting, unlike horse racing in Britain or Australia; the prize fund is the incentive, the racing is a heritage pursuit with royal patronage, and the sport's own bodies have no interest in a betting market arising around it.
The one exception we have seen is a novelty market on a festival final, usually at a book outside our list and usually withdrawn after one season. If a book you use lists one, treat it as a curiosity with a wide margin, not as coverage, and expect the market to be thin.
What a camel racing fan can bet on instead
The rest of the Gulf season is priced everywhere. The ADNOC Pro League, the Qatar Stars League and the Saudi Pro League run through the same winter months, the Dubai World Cup and the Saudi Cup are the horse racing features, and the Bahrain and Abu Dhabi Grands Prix bookend the Formula 1 calendar. The books ranked above carry all of them; 1xBet, 22Bet and BetWinner have the deepest Gulf coverage and the weakest payout records, YYY the strongest Arabic support, Betfinal the widest voucher cashier and Rabona the one book that names horse racing as a sport. The football page and the horse racing page compare them competition by competition, and the mobile page compares the sites that in-play bets are placed on.
Before you bet
Every book on this page is licensed outside the Gulf. Betting by individuals is an offence in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and our UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman guides set out the articles and penalties. Camel racing is one of the few Gulf sports you can follow with no money at stake and lose nothing by it, which is not a small thing; if betting on the other sports stops being fun, our responsible gambling page is the place to start.