‘Every picture has a story’: Celebrating Sheikh Hamdan’s birthday through the candid moments that show who he truly is

Dubai: Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of the UAE, turns 44 today. Most people know the titles. His 17.3 million Instagram followers know something else: a man who calls his camels by name, jumps out of planes over Palm Jumeirah, and treats Dubai’s fog as his favourite photo filter.

His handle is @faz3, after his pen name, Fazza. In the Emirati dialect the word means “someone who rushes to help”. It is a word used in Nabati poetry, which he has written under that pen name since he was young. On his birthday, here is the Fazza his followers see, and the city he loves to share with the world.

Nothing on his feed gets more attention than the stunts. Whether it’s cycling down Sheikh Zayed Road or jumping from an airplane, he shows no fear when it comes to trying new things. He flies his own helicopter over the Palm and The World islands, once captioning the footage “An alternate view of #Dubai.” In April this year, days after aerial sports resumed in Dubai, he posted a picture of himself mid-jump in Skydive Dubai gear, wearing a helmet marked “F3”, the name of his personal sports team based at Nad Al Sheba. In September it was the sea: a freediving collage captioned “Taking airplane mode a little deeper.”

Even his recovery is extreme. In January he walked followers through what he called his exact reset protocol after travel: 20 minutes of red light therapy, three to five minutes in a cryotherapy chamber at minus 110 degrees Celsius, then 26 minutes in a sauna at 80 to 90 degrees, and a five-minute cold plunge to finish. “When recovery is low after travel, I don’t panic, I adjust,” he wrote.

The adventure has a quieter, daily counterpart. Sheikh Hamdan launched the Dubai Fitness Challenge in 2017 with a simple ask: 30 minutes of activity a day for 30 days. “Let’s make Dubai the most active city in the world,” he wrote when he announced it. Across its first nine editions the challenge has drawn more than 16 million participants, and the tenth edition is on now, running until November 29.

He does not just put his name to it. Last year he opened the challenge by cycling down a long road and posting the ride with the note “Day 1, #DubaiFitnessChallenge, #dubai30x30”. He has led the Dubai Run down Sheikh Zayed Road year after year. After last year’s edition drew a record 307,000 runners, he posted a video of the sea of blue taking over the road with the caption “Huge thank you to the 307,000 runners who took part in the Dubai Run. Dubai never stops inspiring.” This year’s run is on November 22, and the -110°C ice chamber, the cold plunges and the sauna sessions he shares are the recovery side of the same habit.

If one thing defines his Instagram, it is animals. In one much-loved video, he sits in his Mercedes G-Class and calls out, “Come here Fares, come here Emaar,” and his two camels trot over to the window for snacks. He has posted a video of chicks that hatched beside his car’s windscreen and were cared for until they could fly. He introduced his horses with the caption “From left to right Koraan Hamdan & Faraan” and the hashtag #bestfriends, and greeted a squirrel with “Here you go little fella”. There have been giraffes, gazelles, oryxes, hedgehogs, a rescue dog named Grace, an elephant that “came to say hi”, and even a hermit crab. His F3 team’s page once posted a clip of a horse nibbling on his shoulder, and another of one planting a kiss on his cheek. He is passing it on, too: he has shared a picture of his son Rashid walking a horse.

The horses are serious business. He won a gold medal at the 2001 World Youth Endurance Championship and first place at the King of Spain Endurance Cup in 2002. The falcons are, too. Few of his posts from the desert are complete without one.

He shoots a lot of it himself, with high-quality cameras and drones as well as his phone, and Dubai is his favourite subject. Fog is his signature. In February this year his aerial video showed the Dubai Frame appearing to float on the clouds and the Burj Khalifa rising above the white. One earlier fog shot came with a caption saying that love “lies beneath the fog”. He has called a photograph of the desert against the Dubai skyline “Two worlds, One city.”

For all the stunts, his gentlest posts are often the ones that go furthest. In May he reposted a Kenyan mother’s video of her son Milan crying because he wanted to go to Dubai, which the boy called a “planet”. Sheikh Hamdan added a message: “It will make me very happy to see you in Dubai, hopefully very soon.” In September he shared a three-generation photo of himself, his father Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, and his young son standing between them, taken outdoors, away from official engagements.

Forty-four years on, the man with the titles is still, to his followers, simply Fazza.

Happy birthday, Sheikh Hamdan.