In a series of articles, Tim Maitland examines how Olympic status for Sevens is changing rugby exponentially away from the sport’s traditional heartlands.
Have you noticed that Rugby Union is changing inexorably, irrevocably… growing exponentially?
Living in one of the heartland nations – in Great Britain, Australasia, France or South Africa – with your focus on the 15-a-side game you might not have felt the earth move under your feet, but there is a seismic shift going on.
To your average rugby player or club member, the sport might not appear that different, but Olympic status for Sevens is changing everything. It’s just that the last place you’ll notice it is in the heat of the Trans-Tasman rivalry of a Bledisloe Cup encounter or during the 6 Nations as England and France or Wales and Ireland butted heads. The changes are happening away from the so-called traditional rugby-playing nations.
“Zoom out from your ‘here and now’ and look at it in the timescale of sports generations rather than in years or single sports seasons and the speed of change is actually head-spinning,” says Giles Morgan, HSBC Group Head of Sponsorship, whose title sponsorship of the HSBC Sevens World Series might be the highest-profile signal of the change.
“In terms of its place in global sport, it’s switched from a country road to a superhighway. Compared to its past, rugby now doesn’t have to worry about oncoming traffic or slowing down for corners; it is pedal to the metal from now to Rio and beyond! It’s a good metaphor because the direction is now clear. I think there are very few obstacles on that road, but there are still important issues like making sure the fuel is there for the journey. For me, when we look back in seven years time, we won’t be able to believe where Sevens has got to. It will be incredible.”
Many rugby fans may have visualized the short-form of the game appearing at the Rio games primarily in terms of some nice publicity for the sport as seven sweaty speedsters, presumably from New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa or Team GB, step onto a podium to collect the gold medals.
The mind-boggling truth is far greater than that, and far more than the hard cash that the Olympics generate.
The real explosion will begin in the second half of 2012, when the sport begins to access the funds available as we enter the four-year cycle leading up to Rio. To give you an idea of the scale, when Badminton was defending itself against the threat of de-selection from the five-ring circus in 2003 it calculated that on top of the US$6 million in TV rights for the post-Athens Olympic cycle (which would have accounted for 50 per cent of the International Badminton Federation’s income for that period), Olympic status was worth another US$110 million to its national associations in government and National Olympic Committee (NOC) grants.
Despite the fact there won’t be as much splashing of cash, 2011 will be a year of unprecedented growth into new or previously low-profile rugby territories.
The Olympic Superpowers
Unsurprisingly, some of the fastest to react are the Olympic superpowers like the United States, China and Russia, from where there are signs of significant growth and improvement.
As a portent of things to come, China created a full-time professional Sevens squad with the sole intention of winning gold in the newly introduced women’s competition at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou. They missed out in the last minute to longtime regional heavyweights Kazakhstan, but over 80,000 spectators witnessed the three-day tournament. It’s safe to say none of this would have happened without Olympic status.
“The Chinese - if they put their mind to it, if they get the right technical support and if they have the right international competition model - can be medal contenders in 2016, there’s no question,” says the International Rugby Board’s Head of Development and Performance Mark Egan, who has a full-time general manager in Beijing.
“The reality is China will be strong in Sevens,” he adds emphatically.
In the men's game, last weekend in Hong Kong Russia showed that they are already very close to living with and beating the best. They reached a first ever Cup quarter final in World Series Rugby and lost rather unluckily against England, 10-7.
“It’s very good for us in Russia, because sport in Russia is very focused on the Olympics,” said Alexandr Tsvetkov, Manager of the Russians in the HSBC Sevens World Series.
“With the sport in the Olympics we have more money, better training, better preparation, everything. Rugby Sevens has taken a very big step in Russia over the last year. There are more teams; more Russian clubs are playing Rugby Sevens. There are more spectators, more pitches and more stadiums. We have a programme for rugby in the schools and rugby will be part of the physical culture for all children in the Moscow region.”
USA: "Plugged into the machine"
In the US, where cold hard cash would seem to be the most important prerequisite for a team that competes on per diems against professionals, even the process of presenting the status quo and future plans to the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) has been described as an enormous positive by their Sevens skipper Matt Hawkins.
“We’ve been plugged into a machine and it’s a great jolt in the right direction, and I think it’s something, especially for the players, we’ve been looking for,” he says.
“The USOC has an amazing infrastructure and an amazing system as far as how they work things and how they get to have so many gold medalists: they are the ultimate winners when it comes to sport!” Hawkins says of an organization that has gobbled up 1,016 gold medals over 46 summer and winter games.
Still the support has started for an American team that, against the odds, has earned a place as one of the core teams on the Sevens circuit and reached its first Cup final in Adelaide last year. NBC’s “America's Olympic Network” will open up new avenues for sponsorship from the exposure it will brought by airing live coverage of the fourth round of the HSBC Sevens World Series, the USA Sevens in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Egan says, the US team is already getting the kind of technical back-up it could only have dreamed about before.
“They won’t get access to a lot of hard cash because they’re not in London 2012, which is where all the money is going, but they are getting access to facilities, sports science, sports medicine, expertise from Olympic consultants who’ve worked with other sports and know how to prepare for an Olympics, and all the elite support services that they might not have the money to buy themselves,” Egan revealed.
“At the end of the day, the NOCs are interested in winning medals. That will be their focus.”
What do you make of Sevens Rugby? >>
