It’s a sign of the Olympic movement’s rapacious desire for growth that the team representing the biggest brand in world rugby have had their medal hopes extinguished before the Olympic
flame has even been lit.
With the All Blacks Sevens dumped out by resurgent South Africa, the side seems to be settling into a steady flow of Olympic disappointment.
Relative to the high expectation that naturally follows them, the All Blacks Sevens could fairly be labelled as among our most underwhelming Olympians. Perennial stars of the sevens circuit before the abbreviated code arrived at the Rio Olympics in 2016, they’ve now got just one silver to show from three appearances.
They fell outside the medals in Brazil and were beaten by Fiji in the final in Tokyo.
Even Sonny Bill Williams – an athlete with the happy knack for winning in any sport he chose – tasted disappointment in Rio. Seldom has reasonable expectation fallen so short in a silver fern blazer.
Fans of the code can look forward to supporting the mighty Black Ferns Sevens, who already have a silver and a gold to their name from their two Olympic appearances. They go into action on Monday, after Saturday’s opening ceremony.
It’s natural that this year’s disappointment for the men is more jarring because they have exited so early. This time around, their hopes were dashed 24 hours before the opening ceremony had begun.
These Olympic Games will run for more than a fortnight – that’s a lot of time to pack in a lot of sport. If organisers can’t fit all the sports they fancy into the 16-day window of the Olympics, they should take a hint and throw a few of the sports out.
But such a move would fly in the face of the IOC’s desire to be the pinnacle of all sporting endeavour. Which is how Sevens got here in the first place – the sport has no shortage of blue-riband events, ranging from its own World Cup to the Commonwealth Games, its annual circuit and (the grandaddy of them all) the Hong Kong Sevens.
The International Olympic Committee seems to run on a one-out-two-in rationale: for every sport that gets dropped from Olympic schedules a couple more get shoehorned in. Welcome, skateboarding and breakdancing; farewell karate, baseball and softball.
Of course, it’s natural that the Olympics evolve – hot-air balloon racing featured in 1900 and poetry was in there alongside the 100m sprint from 1912 to 1948.
The appearance of rugby sevens at the games – and the rapid disappearance of the Kiwi men – is a reminder of how widely and thinly the sevens code is spread.
