Sevens has a long term future. I don’t think that 15s does. The international sevens are embraced by the different unions to various extents. In Ireland they sacrificed the women’s 15s game for the 7s as they thought it was more likely to bear fruits sooner (the men’s international 15 team pays for absolutely everything so they didn’t do it to them though they did lose one of the very best players for the business end of the club season and internationals so that he could play 7s in the Olympics. Not that it mattered.)
Not only is it an Olympic sport but 7s also hosts tournaments in the sports washing states and I think is heavily sponsored by them.
It’s more enjoyable for the average spectator and it’s significantly less dangerous. It’s not too far off tag and touch which you can play as a normal human being without fear of death or permanent disability.
I say this as an adult convert to watching rugby 15s. I think it’s an amazing game (there wasn’t any around when I was a kid so I never played it not that I would have been any good at any position) but I just don’t think it’s a reasonable thing to play and I wouldn’t encourage a child of mine to play it.
Yeah, I first watched a live rugby game in 1986 as a club team from Scotland was touring around the western US playing some exhibition matches against college clubs. It was a lot of fun, and I’d still enjoy watching "regular’ (15s?) if they played in the Olympics. But I was super charmed by this abbreviated version.
Rugby sevens is one of those things that I grew up with, it was a bit to far away to watch it in person but it would be shown on the local ITV franchise every year.
It’s great to see it expanding beyond the Scottish Borders.
I watched most of the Olympics equestrian coverage using the world feed in the Peacock app. Lucinda Green and John Kyle did a really job – their commentary was educational and interesting, and they didn’t jabber on mindlessly to fill every second of silence. When they spoke, it was with purpose.
The highlights, and one of the show jumping events was from the E! feed (why equestrian is on E! other than “E” being in the word “equestrian” is beyond me). It was a shocking contrast.
Gone were those kindly and dulcet Britsh voices with their informative and calm insights into the happenings. In their place was the usual American commentary style of “gotta fill in every moment of airtime with talking no matter how banal”.
Even with a limited number of teams it would take too long to fit in the schedules over the two weeks of the Olympics, the Rugby World Cup last year was held in France – it took 7 weeks, some of that is to extend the competition for television, but the team’s recovery times are much longer than 7s.
7s have changed since I last played, far less kicking and more focus on the three quarters and half backs in the team and less on scrum players (from a 15 team), which has improved the speed and handling skills.
Off the field, the most under-discussed story were the people in Paris who paid for the Olympics with their shelter and sense of stability. About 12,500 unhoused and precariously housed people were bused out of the city. Making the city “Olympics ready” meant a “social cleansing”—or what activists from Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) called nettoyage social. Some were given shelter; others, their whereabouts are unknown. This was an Olympic-size human rights travesty that deserved more coverage.
Now, attention shifts to Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Games. . . . When we consider the massive number of unhoused and precariously housed people in LA—10 times as many as Paris, according to Mejia—one shudders what the “solutions” will entail, especially with California Governor Gavin Newsom waging his war against homeless encampments.
The Olympics are an inequality machine, supercharging all the problems that already exist in the host city. Los Angeles brings Hollywood glitz and glamor but also homelessness, displacement, racialized policing, and a changing environment. If there is one lesson to learn from Paris it is this: Be sober-minded about hosting the Games, don’t drink the Kool-Aid, and definitely do not wait until 2027 to start organizing. There are already activists from NOlympicsLA doing grassroots activism. People should join their efforts to make sure that the most marginalized populations don’t pay the highest price for the next Games.
