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Wayne Smith | October 12, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THE International Olympic Committee probably didn't have this as its prime motivation, but its decision to admit sevens to the Olympic program might just have handed Australian rugby the means of clawing back the ground it has lost to AFL and rugby league.
Just when the Australian Rugby Union's own research was revealing a dire fall-off in participation rates and spectator support, the IOC's vote to admit sevens to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games has given (I was going to say "the 15-a-side code") rugby a huge morale boost.
Aside from touch football, sevens rugby is the game most young rugby league players would find easiest to adapt to. The catch, pass and tackle skills are exactly the same, sevens' three-man scrums an uncomfortably close resemblance to league's farcical set-pieces and much of the time it's not height that wins lineouts in sevens but the height of deception.
So small wonder when Australian sevens coach Michael O'Connor was musing over his dream team for the Samba Games yesterday, NRL players of the ilk of Jarryd Hayne and Billy Slater kept bobbing into his thoughts. Not those two players per se, but whoever their 2016 counterparts might be.
And remember, when the ARU brought Wendell Sailor, Lote Tuqiri and Mat Rogers over from league, the first thing it did was toss them into its sevens program.
"It's the simplest way to learn the game," O'Connor said.
The crossover appeal of sevens to young league players is all too obvious. Nothing like kick-starting your career with an Olympic gold medal. But it is not just league stars who might find themselves thrilled by the thought of marching in an Olympics opening ceremony. The lure would also be there for rising Australian rules players.
Sure they might need some intensive work on their passing skills and arguably on their tackling - although maybe not, if what I saw of the Geelong-St Kilda grand final accurately reflected the current defensive standards in the AFL - but if there is one thing that can be said of Aussie rules footballers, it's they're aerobically super fit.
Indeed, it could even be argued that ball-fetchers like Carlton captain Chris Judd or new St Kilda recruit Andrew Lovett would make the switch to sevens more easily and more successfully than, say, muscular Wallabies captain Rocky Elsom or his predecessor Stirling Mortlock.
Now, if the ARU is smart - which, granted, sounds like the opening line to a Ronnie Corbett joke - it won't restrict entry to its Olympic sevens team merely to registered rugby players. Throw it open to all comers, to the best and brightest of each code.
Even if those players themselves don't decide to make a permanent switch, their young fans watching on would be exposed - some of them for the very first time - to rugby and its worldwide possibilities. Before last Friday, rugby might take you to Paris or London, but never to Rio. Now the whole world opens up.
It goes without saying the bulk of the Australian team will come from within rugby itself and it is pleasing to report that for once the ARU is ahead of the game. Last season, without fanfare, it offered a dozen contracts, each worth around $20,000, to lean, mean youngsters with an aptitude for sevens.
A new round of contracts is about to be issued to selected state academy players, so bit by bit Australian rugby is laying a base of sevens expertise on which to build in the run to Rio. And not just of expertise, but also of sevens-specific fitness, with research carried out by long-time Wallabies doctor Martin Raftery demonstrating young players trained to the peak of aerobic fitness retain the benefits of that work even after they become more physically mature and begin to build themselves up.
In other words, while the Wallabies of today might struggle to cope with the fitness demands of limited-numbers rugby, the sevens-schooled Wallabies of 2016 will have that base to fall back on.
But that's not to say that Australia's Olympic sevens team will be Wallabies-dominated. Chances are only a few Test stars would make it. The bulk of the team almost certainly will be made up of specialists who play nothing but sevens.
At the moment, only males are being offered contracts but, as ARU high-performance unit officer Anthony Eddy indicated yesterday, that could and almost certainly would change if the IRB creates an international women's circuit to shadow the existing men's series.
Please don't sneer at the thought of semi-professional women rugby players. Australia is, as it happens, the reigning world champion in women's sevens, so if anyone is genuinely going for gold in 2016, it's the ladies.
Australia has a lot of ground to make up on the sevens front. Its sevens team operates on a shoestring budget at a time when, for instance, England, has a forwards coach attached to its squad.
But with the IOC deciding 81-8 (with one abstention) to admit it - compared, intriguingly, with the 63-27 (two abstentions) vote for golf - Australian rugby is now up and running in the pursuit of gold.
And who knows, in the process it might even cut back the huge leads of AFL and rugby league.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...015651,00.html
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Originally Posted by Burgs
