Where Camels Race and Win Beauty Contests<br />In the camel beauty contest, contestants were divided into seven categories, including the "two-year-old virgin<br />female camels," "pregnant female camels about to give birth," and "five-year-old (and above) male camels.<br />A New York Times reporter watched one such race firsthand, in which the camel’s handler, driving alongside the animal, clucked softly into a walkie-talkie<br />that transmitted information to the mounted robot to make the camel run faster.<br />The Sultan Bin Zayed Heritage Festival, a two-week event about 60 miles outside Abu Dhabi, celebrates camels in all their unwieldy glory.<br />The Sultan Bin Zayed event showcases one of the few prominent camel races in the region<br />that still uses human jockeys, according to an Agence France-Presse report.<br />But as cosmopolitan city life increasingly overshadow traditional desert life, one festival aims to preserve tradition and introduce U.A.E.<br />They are affixed to the backs of the camels, and camel owners<br />and trainers with remote controls would race in their luxury cars alongside the robot riders on the track.
