Sevens to sacrifice World Cup for Olympics

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Originally Posted by beige

That'd be up to how well USA Rugby manages the funds. A bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

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We may have had this conversation before, but perhaps need input from our US chums. My understanding is that most Olympic funding in the US generally goes to the colleges, not the professional organisations - for instance, I wouldn't think the NBA gets funding for an Olympic team. The "Olympic" version of rugby would not be all mixed in with the rest of the amateur and professional game; not if it is going to receive dedicated funding from the American Olympic Committee. While a single national entity might well be created, I think it is inevitable that it would be functionally separate from the rest of Rugby America and tasked with establishing a country wide training and competition structure. There may be some leveraging off of equipment and talent identification, but there is just no way that Olympic funding is going to be used to generate any sort of forward. There may be some left-over or worn out backs available once their Olympic dream is over, but that would be about it.

My guess is this how it would work... The IOC already recognises the IRB as the sole governing body of the world game. From an Olympic standpoint, the IRB is then the sole decider of who the recognised governing body is for rugby in each country - in this case, USA Rugby. Therefore, I figure that any government money would have to go through USA Rugby and they would distribute accordingly.

It would be interesting then. You may be right - that model would allow the Olympic effort to consist of nothing but maybe funding the travel. USARugby already has a national team, job done.

Just found this article explaining how US Olympic funding works...

http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplac...0.4488947.html

What I'd take from that is that, even if rugby make the Olympics, any player in the USA hoping to make a career from rugby will still have to aim at a professional XVs contract (ala Todd Clever).

Presumably USRugby would become designated as a NGB and made responsible for everything themselves, including funding as described.

One would have to wonder how much pressure would then come to bear to encourage a focus on Sevens rather than that other, non-olympic, thing...

Well we're talking about access to extra funding here so I don't really see it as an issue. If anything it would free up more funds that they would otherwise have to shell out for their sevens campaign.