Getting Abu Dhabi Moving: HARAKA and the Open Masters Games 2026
When the Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 team started planning what's being called the region's largest multi-sport event, they needed more than a venue. They needed somewhere people could actually train, get a feel for the sports on offer, and understand why signing up was worth their time. That's where HARAKA came in, and it's the kind of project we're genuinely pleased to have our name on...
Our flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre, Zayed Sports City, became one of the host venues for the Blueprint Community Training Programme, a run of complimentary training sessions designed to help participants prepare for the Games ahead of time. Rather than turning up on competition day unsure of what to expect, people who came through our doors got a proper taste of the training and coaching that would help them perform, whatever sport they’d chosen to enter. It’s a simple idea, but it matters. Multi-sport events like this only work if the people taking part feel ready, and feeling ready starts weeks or months before the whistle blows.
Alongside the Blueprint sessions, we also delivered corporate and school activations built around the same goal: getting more people, of more ages and backgrounds, into the habit of an active lifestyle. Some of these sat inside workplaces, some inside schools, but all of them fed into the same wider push the Games were built on.
Separately from the training side, we ran a series of awareness activations and Blueprint sessions across key locations in Abu Dhabi between September 2025 and January 2026. These weren’t just marketing exercises. Each one introduced the Games to a new audience, walked people through the range of sports on offer, some familiar and some less so, and gave them a clear, practical route to registering. We wanted people to walk away from an activation knowing exactly what to do next if they fancied taking part, not just feeling vaguely enthusiastic about it.
What tied the whole campaign together was a mix of interactive engagement and movement based experiences rather than static information stands. People got to try things, move, ask questions of coaches on the spot, and see what a session might actually feel like before committing. That approach sat squarely behind the Games’ broader objective, which was never just about filling start lines for 2026 but about building a longer term habit of sport participation across the community.
It’s the sort of brief that plays to what we do well: bringing together an events team, real coaching knowledge, and physical space that can host people at scale, rather than treating awareness campaigns and physical activation as two separate jobs handled by two separate suppliers. For the Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026, having one partner who could do both meant fewer handoffs and a more consistent experience for everyone who came through a session, whichever part of the campaign they met us through.
HARAKA didn’t start out as HARAKA, and it didn’t start out in the UAE either. The business began life in Australia in 2004 under the name Haddins, before moving to the UAE in 2009 and setting up in Abu Dhabi. Over the years that followed, it built a solid reputation in the city’s fitness scene, the kind you earn slowly, through consistent coaching and word of mouth rather than a big launch campaign. In 2022, as the company had grown well beyond a single gym offering into something broader, it rebranded to HARAKA to reflect what it had actually become: a wellness company rather than just a fitness one. All told, that’s more than fifteen years of working in this market.
That history is worth knowing because it explains why a project like the Open Masters Games activation was one we could take on properly rather than stitch together. We have the gym facility at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, we have coaches who’ve spent years working with people across every fitness level, and we have an events team used to running activations at scale. Having all three under one roof is fairly unusual for a wellbeing company Abu Dhabi clients turn to, and it’s exactly what a campaign like this needs: somewhere to train, people who know how to coach that training, and a team who can plan and deliver the public facing side of it.
Our client list gives a sense of the range we work across. We’ve partnered with Zayed Sports City and Ethara, Aldar, Miral, Yas Island, Mubadala, the World Tennis League, G42 and Daman, alongside government partners including the Department of Education and Knowledge, the Department of Community Development, and Ma’an. We also run ongoing programmes like ACTIVE Communities and Healthy School Leaders, and for six months during EXPO 2020 Dubai we ran the Sports, Fitness & Wellbeing Hub there with a team of 32 people on the ground.
Today HARAKA works across six core services: Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach, and Active Youth Holiday Camps, serving individuals, corporate teams, schools and government entities across the UAE. It’s a broad remit, but it comes from the same place every time, which is wanting people to move more and feel better doing it. As an events company Abu Dhabi organisations keep coming back to for both large scale activations and day to day wellbeing work, we like that our projects range from a single corporate wellness day to something as large as a national multi-sport Games campaign.
If you’re planning an event, a wellbeing programme, or anything in between and want a partner who can handle the coaching, the venue and the delivery without passing you between three different suppliers, get in touch with our team. We’d be glad to talk through what you have in mind.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026