As the Pattaya Mail hits 25 years of age this month it is perhaps easy forget the huge changes that have taken place in the seaside resort of Pattaya and its environs since that very first edition hit the newsagents’ shelves in 1993.
An increasing influx of foreign tourists has meant that the city has had to rapidly expand, adapt and try to keep pace with a growing list of demands for first class amenities and leisure attractions. One of the most popular tourist draws in the past two and a half decades has been Pattaya’s enviable proximity to an ever-growing number of top class golf resorts on the Eastern Seaboard, with over 20 courses within an hour’s drive from the city.
The thriving golf scene has also attracted the professional game here and Pattaya has been host to the world’s best female golfers on the LPGA Tour for the past 12 years. More professional events are still signing up here every year as the standards of the golf courses, hotels and facilities continue to increase.
But it’s not just golf that dominates the Pattaya sporting scene; sailing has always been an integral part of life here going way back to the city’s origins as a peaceful fishing village, and now it plays host to major international sailing festivals such as the annual Top of the Gulf Regatta (Asia’s largest regatta by numbers) and last year the World Optimist Championships at Royal Varuna Yacht Club, where close to 300 young sailors from 62 nations worldwide came to compete.
The city was also home to the popular WTA sanctioned Pattaya Women’s Tennis Open championships, which were staged here at the Dusit Thani Resort from 1991 until 2015 and featured many of the biggest names in the game, including former world number 1 Martina Hingis and Russia’s Anna Kournikova.
Pattaya certainly offers a plethora of sporting opportunity and events for both tourists and residents to enjoy; be it golf, sailing, tennis, windsurfing, water-skiing, football, cricket, rugby, athletics, softball and more, and wherever and whenever sports events have taken place in the city the Pattaya Mail has been there to report on it. This publication has been the go-to source for sports news here for the past 25 years and aims to continue that trend long into the future. Pattaya Mail remains your home for local and international sports news.
