dimspace said:
Yemen, or in between the two the Emirates.
There is obviously finance in the area. Those countries are already making strides into other sports, f1, sponsorship of football etc.
Would not surprise me in the slightest to see another gulf tour spring up (is it me or has qatar moved slightly - in time/date, not geographically)
It's probably you. I get a distinct Cuba-pre-Castro-era feeling just reading about Qatar, knowing a teensy bit about the neighborhood and leaning heavily on knowledge gleaned from Wikipedia. Qatar has about a third of the world's gas reserves, and since 1995, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has ruled Qatar, seizing control of the country from his father Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani while the latter vacationed in Switzerland.
A few things sort of doesn't go down well with me here. First of all, a history as a former british colony (in itself, a feature that usually doesn't bode well for the future), secondly, huge wealth from natural resources under the sole ownership of one person that's bound to attract hoards of british and american riff-raff, and thirdly, a connection to Switzerland.
Switzerland? What's wrong with Switzerland?
Well, take Italy, a country with two millennias worth of bloodshed, revenge, omertà, civil war, wars, mob assassinations, Red Brigades, bloodshed, Mussolini, Spartacus trials and Berlusconi combovers. Yet they've produced Michelangelo, daVinci, Corelli, Vivaldi, Botticelli, Ferrari, Maserati, Parma ham, mozzarella, Pinarello, Battaglin etc. etc.
What has Switzerland, with its corresponding two millennia's worth of peace, love and brotherhood and isolation produced? The cuckoo-clock? (Sorry, all readers from Schwartzwald, I know it's you who really left us with that legacy of true ingenuity, and not the Swiss, whose only claim to fame really is a pocketknife and an oversweetened chocolate as well as getting rich from eradicated jews)
No, I don't see a great future on the arabian peninsula for what is, in effect, a european sport. I'd rather see a "Tour d'Europe" with stages in most of the european countries (we could forget Denmark, unless it's the TT-stage).
It'd be a great vehicle for showing off our common cultural heritage, local food, great sport and fantastic landscapes.