With her hunger for learning and a winning attitude, Shaikha Maitha Bint Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum is one of the Arab world’s best-loved athletes. She will have completed 12 years in her chosen sport when she goes to compete in the 2012 London Olympics.
Four years ago, at the Beijing Olympics, Shaikha Maitha became the first woman to represent the UAE at the Olympic Games where she competed in the 67kg taekwondo event. “I am a tough girl,” she said after her game with South Korea’s Hwang Kyung-Seon.
Born in 1980, Shaikha Maitha began her martial arts career at the age of 20 with karate. It was only four years later that she also took up taekwondo.
In 2004, she became the first woman from the UAE to win an international gold medal when she placed first in the karate over-65kg category at the 10th Pan-Arab Games in Algeria. In the same competition, she won a silver in the Open category and bronze in both the team kumite and team kata events. She won the gold again in the Pan-Arab Games in Cairo in 2007.
While determination characterises her, it is not marked by a hunger for awards but a love of learning. In 2003, Shaikha Maitha won the DSF Karate Open Championship, where she defeated Turkey’s Miral Amaz in the final. Never one to gloat, she explained that the UAE Women’s Karate Championship included a training programme with a visit of Japanese karate experts and a training camp with the Turkish team. She told newspapers then, “When we invited the Turkish team to train with us, our hope was to interact with them and benefit from their experience so that we could improve our standard, not to beat them!”
Nevertheless, it is the subject of karate kids’ lore that while the relatively inexperienced Shaikha lost her first match to the Turkish athlete, she used it to learn and change her style for the second match, the Open Weight Final. “Miral didn’t change her style — probably because she is a world champion and did not consider me a threat,” she said then.
Her first success on the continental level came in 2006 in Doha when she won the silver medal at the Asian Games in the over-60kg karate event and went on to win the Arab Athlete of the Year Award in 2007. In 2008, she was named Best Female Arab Sportsperson at the Arab Sports Awards and was voted Best Sports Personality of 2010 at the annual Best In Dubai Awards. She was the first Arab woman to appear in the World Taekwondo Federation rankings system that was launched in 2009, and was classified as No 3 in her weight category. In March this year, she won a gold in GCC Women’s Sports Championships in Abu Dhabi beating her Kuwaiti opponent Hamayal Ghazi Al Yaqoob 6-1 in the 73kg class.
But life is not just about sports for the young royal. Shaikha Maitha has visited Sudan as a special envoy of her father, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai as part of the Dubai Cares initiative, which seeks to raise funds for the education of one million children in poor countries.
